
<#FROWN:R01\>
CarsWHEN I TURNED SIXTEEN, the age where I qualified for a driver's license, driving a car became by obsession. My dad had a Kaiser Traveler which he used for the family business and religiously kept away from me. A car for any sixteen-year-old, I guess, was so rare that those few among us who had access became almost magical folk heroes. Happily my close friend Jack Krongold had a red convertible of his own, so at least I was a backseat guy for my key teenage years.
When I reached twenty, I moved to New York, where owning a car completely disappeared from my mind for several reasons; mainly I couldn't afford to park it, let alone buy it.
Fifteen years later I arrived in Los Angeles to be on a soap opera for six months. Since it was Los Angeles, I had to have a car, and since it was the first time I'd really be making any money, I wanted to buy a Cadillac. When I was a boy growing up, only very successful people drove Cadillacs, and even though I wasn't very successful, I thought I had reached sufficient success to buy a Cadillac - a used one. Besides, I probably wanted to really make up in a big way for all my carless years.
A friend of a friend had a used-car lot, with all kinds of cars, and I went over there right away, looking for my Cadillac. It was a huge place - row after row of cars covering two city blocks. I was wandering around for about ten minutes before I saw it - the most beautiful car I had ever seen in my life: a 1958 white Cadillac convertible with red leather seats. I went to the friend's friend, and he followed me out onto the lot to see what I was so excited about. As we approached the car, he began to shake his head. "You don't want that car," he said. Not exactly what we're supposed to hear from used-car salesmen, but he was a friend's friend, and I was young, without much money.
"Why not?" I asked him as I climbed in and started to press buttons that made the seat move back and forth. "She's a femme fatale," he said, "a siren, a looker who will break your heart." This guy was obviously not your average used-car salesman. He went on: "There's a blue Chevy over here I can really recommend."
"Wait a minute," I said, now hitting the button that made the seat go up and down. "What's the problem right here?"
He said, "I've seen it happen a million times. A kid like you buys a car like that and tries to make a new car out of it. It won't work, and it will end up costing you more money than you can think of."
Hitting the button that made the top go up and down, I said, "How much do you want for it?"
He said, "I'll give it to you for seven hundred dollars, no guarantees, and I'm telling you again not to take it."
"Sold," I said. I wrote him a check and drove it right off the lot, as he stood there shaking his head.
I loved it! I got myself a fancy hat and drove it all over Hollywood with the top down. I had more fun with it than anything I can remember ... for about two weeks. Slowly, the problems started. I didn't take particular notice because I was making some money. The repair bills were dollar25 here, dollar50 there, dollar70 there. After a few more weeks it was dollar125 here, dollar175 there. Each time I was convinced that that would take care of that leak or that veering of the wheels or that fairly loud rattle. It didn't. I was doing exactly what the friend's friend had told me not to: trying to make a new car out of it. I couldn't seem to help myself. It always seemed like it was one repair job away from being perfect. Three thousand dollars' worth of repairs later, I was convinced I now had it all under control.
That afternoon the brakes failed, and I ran into the car in front of me. Nobody was hurt, thankfully. I had them fixed, and a week later they failed again, and I knocked down a telephone pole to avoid hurting anyone. I had them fixed again, but now I was starting to get a little wary. And poor.
One day, coming out of the place where I was staying, I noticed a large puddle of fluid under the car. I got in with my friend, another guy who wasn't going to win any prizes for brains about cars, and we headed down a steep hill, looking for a garage. Halfway down the hill the brakes failed again. We were about fifty yards away from Sunset Boulevard at rush hour. I jumped the curb, grazed a tree, and went right through a brick wall of a garage and stopped. Because the 1958 Cadillac was the most powerful thing around next to a Sherman tank, no one was hurt. I had it towed away, repaired, and the brakes fixed for the third time. After that I decided enough was enough. Fearful that the car would eventually kill someone, I decided to junk it, not sell it.
I drove it over to a junkyard and, after they promised me they would make scrap out of it, made a deal to sell my forty-five-hundred-dollar Cadillac for eight dollars.
It was a femme fatale, a siren, a looker that could break your heart - and everything else.
Judging
I'M NOT TOO BIG on judging. Every time someone starts talking about what's wrong with somebody I wonder and often say, "Why don't we criticize you or me or any of us here?" Obviously none of us is perfect, so why sit and judge others? I mean, really extreme bad stuff I can judge as much as the next guy, but on garden variety faults I'm not much of a judger.
There is one exception to all of this. There is one type I'm constantly judging because they drive me nuts. It's the authoritarian know-it-all, lots-of-rules kind of person.
I first ran into one early on in school. If ever someone like this belongs anywhere, it would be as a teacher in school, but I couldn't handle him there either. I was regularly thrown out of various classes for clashes with these control freaks.
My parents weren't like that, so maybe I was just shocked shortly after kindergarten that it felt like I had unwittingly entered the military. In fact, later in the military it didn't bother me at all. It was so extreme there I secretly thought it was funny. Of course, this was peacetime.
In my adult life these authoritarians have been my curse. I've done everything possible to avoid them. Sometimes it's impossible if they're in your family or you encounter them at work.
Work is the one place I've taken these people on. Most recently there was a producer working on a movie I did. The first time I saw this guy he was fairly quiet. It was a big meeting, so I didn't immediately spot what was in store.
One of the main characteristics of these people is their need to be right. I'm sure it's because they were once made to feel so wrong, so impotent, probably in childhood. I'm sympathetic to that, but I don't want to get beat up because they were subjected to childhood villains.
This particular producer, because of his need to win every point about anything, had alienated about fifty-eight people by the time the movie was over. He made haters out of some of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. His first direct assault on me came one morning, when we were shooting a huge train scene with a lot of extras. When I walked on the set, this guy looked at his watch, then at me, then announced, "I've been ready to shoot since eight-thirty." It was now nine, which was when I had been asked to arrive. I looked at him as though he were speaking Swahili to someone else and went about my business. There were other instances of this treatment toward me and everyone else on the picture. Eventually he was discreetly asked to be around less. That's usually what happens to these control freaks. They win some battles and then lose the war. The problem is they never seem to see the ultimate effect of what they're doing.
Sometimes I can feel sorrow and not anger toward them if I think deeply. Sadly I'm seldom that deep a thinker.
The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.
- THORNTON WILDER
Animals
I HAVEN'T DONE AS well with animals as most people. On the positive side I find most dogs enormously touching and sweet. On the other hand, one of these sweet guys who actually was in my family once joined a dog pack and came after me snarling a long time ago. Our relationship was never the same. I'd still consider a dog in my life if it weren't for pooper-scoopers and shedding.
Cats are out. I'm allergic - heavily. They have their moments, but I've never quite settled in with all that back arching and hissing. The big cats - a lion, anyway - I can't even watch on television. Someone once said if something extremely strange for which there is no logical explanation is going on in your life, it's probably evidence of a previous existence. Judging by how quickly I change the channel when one of those lions comes on, I was once eaten by one; nothing less explains it. And if a lion comes out of a subway as it used to on those commercials - forget about it. I'm pretty quiet for a long time after that.
Oddly enough, my most memorable experience with animals was with, of all things, buffalo.
Very late one night I was walking home from filming a movie, and a herd of buffalo blocked my path. I was filming on the island of Catalina, which is some twenty-five miles off the coast of San Pedro, California. In the 1920s a movie company had gone over there to film a western and taken some buffalo with them. When they left, they left the buffalo.
I was staying a ten-minute boat ride from the main location. It was the only place near where we were filming that there were any kind of accommodations a city guy like me would be happy. The main location mostly offered tents and rooms with no roofs; the facility there was a boys' camp out of season. And while there were some rooms with roofs, all in all I said I'd take the ten-minute boat ride to the citylike accommodations. When I said that, I didn't know the buffalo herd lived over near my place.
A day's filming on a movie is generally at least twelve hours long. By the end of the day, and especially after a bumpy motorboat ride in the sea in total darkness (the driver held a spotlight in his hand), I was truly ready to go home. Once disembarked from the boat, I had a walk of about two hundred yards up a hill. I was always hungry and tired.
Prior to this I had seen a buffalo here and there on the island, always a fair distance away. I'd eyed them warily and kept going. I was told not to walk up and pet them or taunt them, which I hadn't planned to do anyway. I vaguely had heard stories of people who had tried stuff and were sorry, but I didn't know what they'd tried or how sorry they were. That was the extent of my information that night when I encountered the herd.
<#FROWN:R02\>
"No, that'll be fine, thanks," said Tricia. "I can handle it now."
"I can call this room number here for you if that'll help," said the receptionist, peering at the note again.
"No, that won't be necessary, thanks," said Tricia. "That's my own room number. I'm the one the message was for. I think we've sorted this out now."
"You have a nice day now," said the receptionist.
Tricia didn't particularly want to have a nice day. She was busy.
She also didn't want to talk to Gail Andrews. She had a very strict cut-off point as far as fraternizing with the Christians was concerned. Her colleagues called her interview subjects Christians and would often cross themselves when they saw one walking innocently into the studio to face Tricia, particularly if Tricia was smiling warmly and showing her teeth.
She turned and smiled frostily, wondering what to do.
Gail Andrews was a well-groomed woman in her mid-forties. Her clothes fell within the boundaries defined by expensive good taste, but were definitely huddled up at the floatier end of those boundaries. She was an astrologer - a famous and, if rumor were true, influential astrologer, having allegedly influenced a number of decisions made by the late President Hudson, including everything from which flavor of Cool Whip to have on which day of the week to whether or not to bomb Damascus.
Tricia had savaged her more than somewhat. Not on the grounds of whether or not the stories about the president were true, that was old hat now. At time Ms. Andrews had emphatically denied advising President Hudson on anything other than personal, spiritual or dietary matters, which did not, apparently, include the bombing of Damascus. (NOTHING PERSONAL, DAMASCUS! the tabloids had hooted at the time.)
No, this was a neat topical little angle that Tricia had come up with about the whole issue of astrology itself. Ms. Andrews had not been entirely ready for it. Tricia, on the other hand, was not entirely ready for a rematch in the hotel lobby. What to do?
"I can wait for you in the bar, if you need a few minutes," said Gail Andrews. "But I would like to talk to you, and I'm leaving the city tonight."
She seemed to be slightly anxious about something rather than aggrieved or irate.
"Okay," said Tricia. "Give me ten minutes."
She went up to her room. Apart from anything else, she had so little faith in the ability of the guy on the message desk at reception to deal with anything so complicated as a message that she wanted to be doubly certain that there wasn't a note under the door. It wouldn't be the first time that messages at the desk and messages under the door had been completely at odds with each other.
There wasn't one.
The message light on the phone was flashing, though.
She hit the message button and got the hotel operator.
"You have a message from Gary Andress," said the operator.
"Yes?" said Tricia. An unfamiliar name. "What does it say."
"Not hippy," said the operator.
"Not what?" said Tricia.
"Hippy. What it says. Guy says he's not a hippy. I guess he wanted you to know that. You want the number?"
As she started to dictate the number Tricia suddenly realized that this was just a garbled version of the message she had already had.
"Okay, okay," she said. "Are there any other messages for me?"
"Room number?"
Tricia couldn't work out why the operator should suddenly ask for her number this late in the conversation, but gave it to her anyway.
"Name?"
"McMillan, Tricia McMillan." Tricia spelled it, patiently.
"Not Mr. MacManus?"
"No."
"No more messages for you." Click.
Tricia sighed and dialed again. This time she gave her name and room number all over again, up front. The operator showed not the slightest glimmer of recognition that they had been speaking less than ten seconds ago.
"I'm going to be in the bar," Tricia explained. "In the bar. If a phone call comes through for me, please would you put it through to me in the bar?"
"Name?"
They went through it all a couple more times till Tricia was certain that everything that possibly could be clear was as clear as it possibly could be.
She showered, put on fresh clothes and retouched her makeup with the speed of a professional and, looking at her bed with a sigh, left the room again.
She had half a mind just to sneak off and hide.
No. Not really.
She had a look at herself in the mirror in the elevator lobby while she was waiting. She looked cool and in charge, and if she could fool herself she could fool anybody.
She was just going to have to tough it out with Gail Andrews. Okay, she had given her a hard time. Sorry, but that's the game we're all in - that sort of thing. Ms. Andrews had agreed to do the interview because she had a new book out and TV exposure was free publicity. But there's no such thing as a free launch. No, she edited that line out again.
What had happened was this:
Last week astronomers had announced that they had at last discovered a tenth planet, out beyond the orbit of Pluto. They had been searching for it for years, guided by certain orbital anomalies in the outer planets, and now they'd found it and they were all terribly pleased, and everyone was terribly happy for them and so on. The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer's parrot - there was some tediously heartwarming story attached to this - and that was all very wonderful and lovely.
Tricia had followed the story with, for various reasons, considerable interest.
Then, while she had been casting around for a good excuse to go to New York at her TV company's expense, she had happened to notice a press release about Gail Andrews and her new book, You and Your Planets.
Gail Andrews was not exactly a household name, but the moment you mentioned President Hudson, Cool Whip and the amputation of Damascus (the world had moved on from surgical strikes - the official term had in fact been 'Damascectomy,' meaning the 'taking out' of Damascus), everyone remembered who you meant.
Tricia saw an angle here which she quickly sold to her producer.
Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space knew something about your day that you didn't must take a bit of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of rock out there that nobody had known about before.
That must throw a few calculations out, mustn't it?
What about all those star charts and planetary motions and so on? We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was rising? Wouldn't the whole of astrology have to be re-thought? Wouldn't now perhaps be a good time to own up that it was all just a load of hogwash and instead take up pig farming, the principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis? If we'd known about Rupert three years ago, might President Hudson have been eating the chocolate flavor on Thursday rather than Friday? Might Damascus still be standing? That sort of thing.
Gail Andrews had taken it all reasonably well. She was just starting to recover from the initial onslaught, when she made the rather serious mistake of trying to shake Tricia off by talking smoothly about diurnal arcs, right ascensions and some of the more abstruse areas of three-dimensional trigonometry.
To her shock she discovered that everything she delivered to Tricia came right back at her with more spin on it than she could cope with. Nobody had warned Gail that being a TV bimbo was, for Tricia, her second stab at a role in life. Behind her Chanel lip gloss, her coupe sauvage and her crystal blue contact lenses lay a brain that had acquired for itself, in an earlier, abandoned phase of her life, a first-class degree in mathematics and a doctorate in astrophysics.
As she was getting into the elevator, Tricia, slightly preoccupied, realized she had left her bag in her room and wondered whether to duck back out and get it. No. It was probably safer where it was and there wasn't anything she particularly needed in it. She let the door close behind her.
Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath, if life had taught her anything it was this: Never go back for your bag.
As the elevator went down she stared at the ceiling in a rather intent way. Anyone who didn't know Tricia McMillan better would have said that that was exactly the way people sometimes stared upward when they were trying to hold back tears. She must have been staring at the tiny security video camera mounted up in the corner. She marched rather briskly out of the elevator a minute later, and went up to the reception desk again.
"Now, I'm going to write this out," she said, "because I don't want anything to go wrong."
She wrote her name in large letters on a piece of paper, then her room number, then IN THE BAR and gave it to the receptionist, who looked at it.
"That's in case there's a message for me. Okay?"
The receptionist continued to look at it.
"You want me to see if she's in her room?" he said.
Two minutes later, Tricia swiveled into the bar seat next to Gail Andrews, who was sitting in front of a glass of white wine.
"You struck me as the sort of person who preferred to sit up at the bar rather than demurely at a table," she said.
This was true, and caught Tricia a little by surprise.
"Vodka?" said Gail.
"Yes," said Tricia, suspiciously. She just stopped herself from asking, How did you know? but Gail answered anyway.
"I asked the barman," she said, with a kindly smile.
The barman had her vodka ready for her and slid it charmingly across the glossy mahogany.
"Thank you," said Tricia, stirring it sharply.
She didn't know quite what to make out of all this sudden niceness and was determined not to be wrong-footed by it. People in New York were not nice to each other without reason.
"Ms. Andrews," she said, firmly, "I'm sorry that you're not happy. I know you probably feel I was a bit rough with you this morning, but astrology is, after all, just popular entertainment, which is fine. It's part of showbiz and it's a part that you have done well out of and good luck to you. It's fun. It's not a science though, and it shouldn't be mistaken for one. I think that 's something we both managed to demonstrate very successfully together this morning, while at the same time generating some popular entertainment, which is what we both do for a living. I'm sorry if you have a problem with that."
"I'm perfectly happy," said Gail Andrews.
"Oh," said Tricia, not quite certain what to make of this. "It said in your message that you were not happy."
"No," said Gail Andrews. "I said in my message that I thought you were not happy, and I was just wondering why."
Tricia felt as if she had been kicked in the back of the head. She blinked.
"What?" she said quietly.
"To do with the stars. You seemed very angry and unhappy about something to do with stars and planets when we were having our discussion, and it's been bothering me, which is why I came to see if you were all right."
Tricia stared at her. "Ms. Andrews -" she started, and then realized that the way she had said it sounded exactly angry and unhappy and rather undermined the protest she had been trying to make.
"Please call me Gail, if that's okay."
<#FROWN:R03\>For one thing, it consists almost entirely of Japanese people. For another thing, they don't shake hands. They bow. They're not big on physical contact, especially with strangers. They'd be uncomfortable at a typical American social gathering, where people who barely know each other will often kiss and hug, and people who are really close will sometimes have sexual relations right in the foyer.
The Japanese are also formal about names, generally addressing each other with the honorary title 'san', as in 'Osaka-san', which is like saying 'Mr.Osaka'. I understand that, even if two Japanese have worked together for many years, neither would dream of using the other's first name. Whereas Americans are on a first-name basis immediately, and by the end of the first day have generally graduated to 'Yo, Butthead!'
One night in Tokyo we watched two Japanese businessmen saying good-night to each other after what had clearly been a long night of drinking, a major participant sport in Japan. These men were totally snockered, having reached the stage of inebriation wherein every air molecule that struck caused them to wobble slightly, but they still managed to behave more formally than Americans do at funerals. They faced each other and bowed deeply, which caused both of them to momentarily lose their balance and start to pitch face-first to the sidewalk. Trying to recover their balance, they both stepped forward, almost banging heads. They managed to get themselves upright again and, with great dignity, weaved off in opposite directions. If both of them wound up barfing into the shrubbery, I bet they did it like Alfonse and Gaston, in a formal manner.
I never really did get accustomed to all the bowing. According to the guidebooks, there's an elaborate set of rules governing exactly how you bow, and who bows the lowest, and when, and for how long, and how many times, all of this depending on the situation and the statuses of the various bowers involved. Naturally, my family and I, being large, ignorant foreign water buffalos, were not expected by the Japanese to know these rules. Nevertheless we did feel obligated to attempt to return bows when we got them.
This happened quite often. It started when we arrived at our hotel in Tokyo. As I was descending the steps of the airport bus, two uniformed bellmen came rushing up and bowed to me. Trying to look casual but feeling like an idiot, I bowed back. I probably did it wrong, because then they bowed back. So I bowed back. The three of us sort of bowed our way over to where the luggage was being unloaded, and I bowed to our suitcases, and the bellmen, bowing, picked them up and rushed into the hotel. We followed them past a bowing doorman into the hotel, where we were gang-bowed by hotel employees. No matter which direction we turned, they were aiming bows at us, sometimes from as far as twenty-five yards away.
Bobbing like drinking-bird toys, we bowed our way to the reception desk, where a bowing clerk checked us in. Then we bowed our way over to the elevators, where we encountered our first Elevator Ladies. These are young, uniformed, relentlessly smiling women who stand by the elevators in hotels and stores all day. Their function is to press the elevator button for you. Then, when the elevator comes, they show you where it is by gesturing enthusiastically toward it, similar to the way that models gesture on TV game shows when they are showing some lucky contestant the seventeen-piece dinette set that he has just won.
"Here's your elevator!" is the message of this gesture. "Isn't it a beauty?"
Throughout our stay in Japan, every Elevator Lady managed to give the impression that she was genuinely thrilled that I had chosen to ride her elevators, as opposed to some other form of vertical transportation. I never saw one who seemed to resent the fact that she was stuck in, let's face it, a real armpit of a job. If I did their work, it would turn me into a stark raving lunatic. Within days I'd be deliberately ushering people into open elevator shafts.
Anyway, we got into our hotel elevator, and the E.L. stood outside and bowed deeply as the doors closed. I bowed back, but not too low, for fear of getting my head caught in the doors. Alone in the elevator, I wondered if maybe all the bowing had been some kind of elaborate prank on us, and if at that very moment the hotel employees were all giving each other high-five handslaps and laughing so hard that they drooled on their uniforms.
We got to our room and seconds later the bellmen knocked at the door, bowed their way inside, laid out our luggage, and checked to make sure that the room was O.K. Then - this was an amazing event to witness - they left. They just walked out of the room.
An American bellman, of course, stands around in a congenial yet determined manner, waiting for you to figure out that you had not tipped him yet. If it doesn't dawn on you right away, he'll start telling you about some of the hotel's available special guest services, such as breakfast; or start demonstrating various deluxe features of the room, such as that it has electric lights, which you can operate via switches. If necessary he will stay in your room all night. You get up at 3:00 A.M. to go to the bathroom, and there is your bellman, showing you where the flush handle is and just generally continuing to be helpful until spontaneously decide to give him a token of your gratitude.
But there's no tipping in Japan. You just don't do it. Even in restaurants. When people serve you in some manner, you simply say 'Thank you,' and they don't get angry or anything. In fact, they often seem happy to have had the opportunity to serve you, if you can imagine. This was quite a shock for me, coming from a country where you regularly find yourself tipping people just so they won't spit on you.
The mysterious thing about all this is that Japan - ask anybody who has been there - has superb service. And not just in nice hotels. Everywhere. You walk into any store, any restaurant, no matter how low-rent it looks, and I bet you that somebody will immediately call out to you in a cheerful manner. This happened to us all over. I never understood what the people were saying, of course. They could have been saying: "Hah! Americans! We will eventually purchase your entire nation and use the Lincoln Memorial for tofu storage!" But they always sounded friendly and welcoming. And they were always eager to wait on us. I couldn't help but think of the many times I've been in American stores, especially large ones, attempting to give somebody some money in exchange for merchandise - which I always thought was the whole point of stores - but was unable to do so because the store employees were too busy with other, higher-priority activities, such as talking or staring into space. More than once, in America's stores, I have felt like an intruder for trying to give money to clerks. "Oh great" is their unspoken but extremely clear attitude. "Here we had everything going nice and smooth, and along comes this doofus who wants - of all things! - to make a purchase. In a store, for God's sake."
I'll give you another example of what I'm talking about. We've traveled extensively in the United States, and often our son travels with us, and when he does we always try to arrange to have one of those folding beds for him in our hotel room. Beth always calls the hotel in advance and asks them to please write down that we want a folding bed. She calls later to confirm that there will be a folding bed. When we check in, we always remind them that we need a folding bed.
So needless to say, there has never - not once, in ten years, in dozens and dozens of hotels - been an actual folding bed in our room when we got there. We always have to call Housekeeping to ask for it, and nothing happens, so we call again, and maybe again, and of course Housekeeping is not happy about this - "These damned guests! Always calling Housekeeping and requesting Housekeeping services!" - and then finally, often late at night, our folding bed will be brought to us by a person who is obviously annoyed about having to deliver beds in the middle of the night to people who should have thought to arrange this earlier. Naturally, I always give this person a tip.
In Japan, the bed was always there, at every hotel, when we checked in. This may seem minor to you, but to us it was a miracle, comparable in scope to having a total stranger hold a door open for you in New York City.
I'll give you another minor but typical hotel example. When we checked into our hotel in Hiroshima, I noticed that our bathtub faucet would not produce hot water, so I called the front desk. In America, the front desk would have told me that somebody would be up to take a look at it, and eventually somebody would, but not necessarily during my current lifetime.
In Hiroshima, a bellman arrived at our room within, literally, one minute. He had obviously been sprinting, and he looked concerned. He checked the faucet, found that it was, indeed, malfunctioning, and - now looking extremely concerned - sprinted from the room. In no more than three minutes he was back with two more men, one of whom immediately went to work on the bathtub. The sole function of the other one, as far as we could tell, was to apologize to us on behalf of the hotel for having committed this monumentally embarrassing and totally unforgivable blunder.
"We are very sorry," he kept saying, looking as though near tears. "Very sorry."
"It's OK!" I kept saying. "Really!" But it did no good. The man was grieving.
The bathtub was fixed in under ten minutes, after which all three men apologized extravagantly in various languages one last time, after which they left, after which I imagine that the hotel's Vice President for Faucet Operations was taken outside and shot.
No, just kidding. He probably took his own life. That's how seriously they take their jobs over there.
I keep reading that American businesses have figured out that they need to focus more attention on customer service, but I'm afraid we have a long way to go before we catch up to the Japanese. As I write these words, Beth and I are in a state of seething semihomicidal rage resulting from our repeated unsuccessful attempts to give money to Sears in exchange for fixing some problems with our refrigerator. Beth called the Sears Service Department two weeks ago and spoke to a Customer Service Representative who agreed to schedule a Repair Technician to come out. The Customer Service Representative was willing to tell Beth the day this would happen, but - you appliance-owners out there know how this works - she refused to reveal the time that the technician would be here.
This is because of National Security. If we knew the exact time that our appliance was being repaired, there is the danger that we might blurt this information out in public. We'd be in a restaurant, for example, and we'd have a few too many glasses of wine, and one of us would say, "Well, the Sears Refrigerator Repair Technician is coming to our house at two-thirty P.M. on Wednesday." We wouldn't even consider the possibility that the bus-boy lurking just a few feet away might be an enemy agent, and that we had blown the entire operation.
So when the day came, Beth stayed home all day, waiting for the Repair Technician, who of course did not show up.
<#FROWN:R04\>She'd hook that little old crooked-legged mule up to the wagon and go down and cut a load of wood like a man. Could ride a horse, bareback, like nothing you ever seen. Shoot a gun. Had her own rabbit gums. That's right.
I've forgotten what that little crooked-legged mule's name was.
She got whipped too. For all the normal things. She got where she'd sit around behind the store and smoke cigarettes. That store had been there since way before cars, and there was a hitching post out in front of it. So ... see, girls didn't smoke back then, nowhere, but she was going out behind the store and smoking with the store-owner's daughter, who was mean. Somebody told Papa, and he made her stand at the hitching post and smoke five cigarettes in a row for five days in a row. Every day the crowd got a little bigger and a little bigger. She stopped smoking, too.
I imagine of all the people in the family, me and her was the closest. She'd go hunting with me, and we had fights. She never forgot some of the things that happened. One time I held up a rabbit from one of my gums to show her, cause she didn't get any that morning, and that rabbit jerked loose and went running off and she fell on the ground laughing. She told about that over and over. She could actually skin a rabbit faster than I could. That's no lie. She was quicker than me in some ways, once she growed up a little bit. I'm talking about when she was around thirteen, fourteen, and I was eighteen or nineteen, before I stopped living up there and then run off after Mama married old man Harper.
Aw, there's a lot of different things that I could tell, you know, about the whole entire country around in there and everywhere from Bethel all the way back to the old mill place and down below up the old ah, ah penitentiary place and all the way coming back into Summerlin, where we used to go and what we used to do, but it's hard to remember a lot of that stuff. And, that was before World War I.
And now here I am with my groin getting eat out. Looks like I would be allowed to go out peaceable. They say He works in mysterious ways. Well, I do too.
Faison
Tate keeps his place pretty nice. I been aiming to put up some kind of blinds, shades, in mine, something on my windows. What's hanging in my bedroom is a poncho, and when I got back from Tate's, I looked through the head hole to see if I could see that dog out back that had been barking for the last two days solid. But there's a row of bushes at the back end of the yard that hides him.
At least I never had this problem living at the motel. Didn't have to worry about no curtains either.
I headed for the kitchen, got a beer.
I was thinking.
Few minutes later, I stood on their porch and knocked on their screen door. I saw them moving in a couple of weeks ago.
One window on each side of the front door. The window shades were pulled down - gold colored. A TV was on somewhere in there. I opened the screen door and knocked. The door come open on its own.
I stuck my head in. TV noises from in there in that first room on the left. Fishing gear was on the floor of a hall that ran front to back. I closed the door behind me, tried to see what make the fishing reels were - one was a Penn. I knocked on the door to the room.
This voice from inside: "Yeah?"
"I need to talk to somebody."
"Just a minute." The door opened. Short, stocky man, reddish hair, scrawny mustache - little clusters of red hairs like. "What do you want?" he says.
"I got a complaint. That dog out back's about to drive me crazy. He's been barking for -"
"It's my brother's, but he's asleep. He'll be leaving in a week or so, and he'll take the dog with him. So you don't have nothing to worry about."
The guy was acting like, hey, no big deal. But for me it was. So I said, "Well, you go wake him up, because something's got to give here. That dog's driving me crazy." He had already started shutting the door.
"Hey," he said, opening the door again. "He's got a nerve problem. I can't bother him right now."
"Can't bother -"
"You live around here?" He looked over his shoulder at the TV.
"Yeah. I live right out there."
"Well, he's asleep now, and I ain't waking him up. He's pretty nervous."
"Look, man, either somebody shuts up the dog, or I shut up the dog. I don't have to sit in my own house and be disturbed by some dog after I give a warning. This is a warning. Okay? I mean this has been going on two whole days and nights. It's driving me crazy."
This is the kind of situation where Uncle Grove would kick ass. I been with him when he did.
"Give me your phone number," he says. He could see I was serious. He writes down my phone number on a newspaper.
"If I ain't heard from him by five o'clock," I say, "I'll figure nothing ain't going to be done."
"I'll give him the number," he says. "He'll call."
So I come on back home and I'm thinking: I go out and talk to this guy. Right? He acts like I'm the one bothering him. He's mouthing off at me. Now ain't this something? This is the guy with the barking dog. And who's mouthing off at who? There's people like this all over the world. They don't think about nothing but theirselves. They're everywhere, and when you bring it to their attention, they go all to pieces. And a bigger problem is the people that let them get by with it. You got jerks all over the place that won't say nothing to these kind of assholes. They'd rather get run all over. They'd rather avoid a little trouble. They're what's wrong with this country.
I got my twelve-gauge Remington automatic out of the closet, found a box of shells, buckshot, in the top dresser drawer, got out seven, dropped them on the bed. By god, if I did end up shooting this dog, the dog wouldn't just be dead. He'd be dead dead. I wouldn't do nothing like this half-ass.
The Remington is my daddy's. Was my daddy's. He probably didn't use it no more than eight or ten times in his life. He gave it to me after he got sick this last time. Last long time. He took me quail hunting a few times when I was little, but hell, I did more stuff like that with Uncle Grove in the six months I stayed with him than I did with my daddy all my life. Hunting, fishing, stuff like that.
Uncle Grove used to have a bunch of guns. He's still got that one that was handed down - the double-barrel with the old-fashioned hammers, handed down from his daddy, my mama's daddy - the gun that was in a fight at a liquor still, got hit with buckshot. Uncle Grove told me that story a bunch of times. His daddy had to pick buckshot out of this nigger's head. Black man.
Mama told me some stuff, too. I remember her letting me sew one time - stick a needle with a white thread through a button hole. And I remember her chasing me around the house one time, and driving me to town in a car. She was pretty.
Phone rang. "Hello." It was the guy with the dog. Okay, I thought, let's see what's coming down here.
"You the one wanted me to call you?"
"Yeah. That dog has been barking for two solid days and nights, and it's driving me crazy."
"I think I can get him quiet," he says.
"That's good," I said. "You want to take him in the house, fine. It ain't my problem. But if I have to, I'll - "
"Where you located?"
"Out your back door and to the left. That's my house." No way to meet this kind of thing but head-on, so I said, "I'll meet you out at the bushes there if you want to."
So I go on out there and when I see this guy, I say, "You're the same guy!"
"Nah," he says. "He's my twin brother."
"You ain't the same one?" They looked exactly alike.
"No way. Now look here," he says, "the dog was just barking, that's all."
"I know he was just barking. That's what he's been doing for two days and nights. That's the problem."
The dog starts yelping. Right then and there. So the guy acts a little nervous.
I yell, "Shut up!"
The dog stops barking. The guy looks at me, at the dog. "Good boy," he says to the dog.
There was a break in the bushes - a path. "Let me see the dog," I said. "I know something about dogs." I do, too. I walked on through.
The dog was in one side of a double garage. A motorboat was in the other side, where the sun shined in, propped up on a little refrigerator. The dog was standing in the shady part, breathing vapor, chain running from his collar through a hole in the back of the garage and all these cages the size of suitcases laying around in there.
Dog wagged his tail, pranced on his front paws. I put out my fist. The dog licked it. "It's a Doberman," I said, squatting down. "Or mostly Doberman."
Another dog, a pointer - liver and white - stood up from behind the boat. He stretched and shook off all over. "Whose pointer?" I said. "He's right pretty."
"Jimmy's. I bought them both, gave Jimmy the bird dog. He is pretty."
"Looks like a bird dog I used to have. I was going to give my boy a bird dog."<quote>
"What happened?"
"He died," I said.
"I had a pit bull die on me three, four years ago. But he'd been eat up pretty good before I bought him."
"My boy died," I said.
"Damn. I'm sorry. What happened? Or ... you know."
"Car wreck." I didn't want to go into all that. "You hunt any?"
"Used to. But I quit shooting the birds. What's your name?"
"Faison."
"I quit shooting the birds, Faison. You know, got tired of it. But Jimmy still hunts. Goes all the time."
Right here I thought, man. Here's a bird dog - good-looking bird dog. Here's somebody at my back door that likes to hunt birds. I hadn't been hunting in a long, long time. "What are all those cages for?" I couldn't figure that one out.
"Snakes. Jimmy's a snake handler. Does shows for schools and stuff."
"Has he got any in there? Maybe that's why -"
"Naw, he's out of snakes right now. He lets them out under the neighbors' houses."
"What? He what?"
"Just kidding. He sells them, lets them out in the woods, different stuff. He's supposed to be getting some new ones. Jimmy don't stay out of snakes long." He patted the bird dog's head, looked at me. "He says he's going bird hunting in the morning. Try out that dog. Dog's been broke. Think you might want to go?"
"Well. Yeah, I'll go bird hunting. I'll go bird hunting."
The pointer had good blood. You could tell. A beautiful dog. "But we got to do something about this other one's barking," I said.
"We'll work something out. We'll bring him inside if he keeps it up. His name is Cactus. Hey, Jimmy," he yelled.
<#FROWN:R05\>
'I CAN'T GO ON'
WRITER'S BLOCK
"Yes for the last two weeks I have written scarcely anything. I have been idle; I have failed."
- KATHERINE MANSFIELD
"When I see a barrier I cry and curse, and then I get a ladder and climb over it."
- JOHN H. JOHNSON, JOHNSON PUBLISHING CO.
WHAT more can afflict the unfortunate wretches who pursue the literary dream? So much struggeling to be a writer, croaking to sound like one, straining to soar above the crowd! And just when lift-off seems imminent - the ground turns to quicksand. The writer sinks up to the nostrils in muck. Crawling things awaken. The silent screams begin. This is the nightmare they call ... block.
Block. What a nasty word, this combination of blah and blechh, this icky reminder of blocked bowels. The eversuggestible writer has only to hear the word to crumple like Woody Allen when someone says "castration."
WORD BLOCK
Discussions of writer's block usually concern the flow of words and how to get words flowing again when the brain seems to shut down. As if a writer's brain could ever shut down or up for more than five seconds. What the brain does is slip away from drudgery and into the writer's preferred pastime, daydreaming. Daydreaming inspires a literary effort and previews its glorious rewards, but it doesn't do the coal-faced labor of research, organization, drafting, and revising. No writer descends willingly to those mines, where words are hacked one by one from the blackness. Facing that dusty pit feels very much like block, whatever else it might be.
Maddening and debilitating, the condition strikes even the most prolific writers. Charles Dickens described his block in terms of "prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out of the window, tearing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up ...." But Dickens, if only to pay his debts, got himself going again. So do most blocked writers, some by riding it out, others by heeding the advice of others. Author Barry Hannah views the condition simply as one more experience to file away. "I had a terrible block against writing this summer," he said in an interview, "and even that I'll look at as subject matter."
Every communications pundit can tell others how to beat word block: Just get something down, anything the brain spews out. You can shape and prune later, in revisions and rewrites. Passion first, control second. Shout first, write second. Henriette Anne Klauser splits the artist's mind in Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: Breakthrough Techniques for People Who Write. The brain's right hemisphere creates, the left one edits. Play first, then work, she advises; blockage comes from trying to do both at once. (And from thinking about cerebral hemispheres at war.)
FLEDGLING writers want to pump greatness from the moment they have a title in mind. They center that glorious title -
Coming of Age in Kankakee
- skip a space, and enter their byline. They wrestle with an opening line. "This is the untold story of ..." They watch the blinking cursor. The story dissolves into scenarios of their own fame. Soon they can hear the echos from posterity - "It was to be her greatest work" - when in truth it was to be her biggest block until she gave up writing and went into real estate. Indeed, William Zinsser describes how aspiring writers set out "to commit an act of literature," an impossible task. Journalism-trained authors like Isabel Allende know better. "I don't think of literature as an end in itself," she says. "It's just a way of communicating something."
Reckless bravado may work for some in launching a project, particularly dramatists who thrive on the theatrical flourish. Lanford Wilson, after winning the Pulitzer, is said to have begun a subsequent work with the heading: "THIS IS THE NEXT PLAY BY LAST YEAR'S PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING LANFORD WILSON." Most writers would rise to this challenge with about nine years of creative paralysis.
For the average writer facing a slow start or a temporary block, here are the more conventional approaches to making the words flow again:
Do a 'freewrite' of unedited, unpublishable banter on your topic. Write fast. Try not to stop. Get it down.
Write yourself a newsy letter or telegram covering the high points; don't bother with beginnings, transitions, or endings but just write chunks that turn you on.
Begin thusly: "What I really want to say is ..." or "I would like to write about ..."
Begin a difficult passage with a question you want it to answer. Answer the question. Then delete the question itself.
End the day's writing in midstream, with a passage that's easy to continue rather with a sealed-off unit.
Don't get hung up on a word. Write a strings of x's and finish the sentence. Later, perhaps as you walk around the block, the xxxxx word will come to you.
You're blocked because you're tired and benumbed. Get away from your desk. Get some rest. Shorten your writing sessions.
You're blocked because you hate the particular project. Cut your losses by backing out. Spend the time you've gained on jobs you can live with.
You're blocked because you're disgusted with the pages you've written thus far. Don't look at them. Brian Aldiss, who writes a novel and several short stories each year, says he places completed pages face down and won't backtrack until the first draft is completed. This way he sustains the necessary "vision" and "creative glow." Later, "creative hope mixed with critical discontent" carries him through the rewrites.
You're blocked because you're distracted. Clear your desk of clutter. Write early in the morning, before the world's distractions begin. Or get out of the house altogether if you can find a work space elsewhere. For San Francisco writer Diane Johnson, "home is home and writing is work." (Better-heeled than most, Johnson chose as her workplace Villa Serbelloni, a historic mansion overlooking Lake Como in Northern Italy.)
You're blocked not because your mind is blank, but because it's overloaded with all the good ideas that have percolated during the day. Now, as you start to write, they want to pour out all at once and seem to evaporate. If you've written them down, as you must, take one idea at a time and work it through. Keep a notepad handy (on or off screen) even as you write; record the new ideas that shoot by and tend to derail you and deal with them later.
You are blocked because it's getting you some attention; because you (or someone close to you) romanticize artistic failure and self-destruction. You and your enablers must grow up. Kate Braverman recalls a time when, "for me, art required certain elements of self-destruction. Becoming a mother was the turning point. Then health and sanity began to have the allure that sickness had had."
You're blocked because you've discovered a problem in premise or structure or some other fundamental aspect that can't be resolved. Annie Dillard's advice: "Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles." Accept it and keep writing, she says. Like with a dying friend, you sit up with your book and hold its hand and hope it gets better. Braverman agrees. "Always finish the failure - you'll never know when there's going to be a mutation."
AN IDEA FROM THE BUSINESS WORLD
The business world hates leaving anything to chance, including creativity. Blocked creativity is money lost. So enter Edward de Bono, a learned Brit who turned a technique he calls "lateral thinking" into a worldwide management-training industry. In Lateral Thinking for Management, one of his avalanche of books, de Bono offers a process of breaking away from the cognitive patterns ("vertical thinking") people tend to use in solving problems. Such patterns produce blah solutions or dead ends. Lateral thinking gets away from choosing the next logical step; it invites completely irrelevant ideas to "intrude" on the continuity of patterned thinking. From these instrusions come disconnected, off-the-wall ideas that seem unrelated to the problem until - bong! - they generate creative and exceptional solutions. Lateral thinking is akin to what writers call intuitive flashes and insights, but more systematic.
For example, de Bono uses the "random word" exercise to introduce discontinuity into patterned thinking. You are blocked. Every idea follows trite patterns. Now, open a dictionary anywhere; the first noun defined on the page (no cheating!) is your unblocking word. Play with all its meanings for about three minutes and see what wild, unchosen connections they might have to your original problem. In de Bono's example, the problem is finding better incentives for a sales force, and the word gong pops up. Instead of the traditional incentives, he begins thinking of gonglike proclamations of top performances, loud and brief incentives such as short-term cash prizes, and so on. If de Bono were struggling to create a fictional salesman, the process might be something like: Gong - Short, punchy. A son named Bong ... Bing ... Biff! Gong - Percussion ... crash ... car crash ... suicide ... car crash suicide and insurance for the family!
THERE are whole treatises on writer's block, including one from the never-blocked advice factory called Writer's Digest. A Wisconsin workshop offers "Twelve Ways to Smash Block" with the cheesy promise, "You never need suffer from writer's block or writer's blank again."
Advice is always easy to give. Jay Parini's essay, "The More They Write, the More They Write," quotes Iris Murdoch and Stephen King, who knock out about a half million words a year between them. "I just keep writing," says Murdoch when asked about being stuck. "I just flail away at the thing," says King. One's own block, however, feels less like being "stuck" than like clinical depression, which it sometimes is. This is the true quicksand, and the harder one tries to climb out the deeper one sinks. Advising severely blocked writers to "write themselves a letter" is like telling depressives to cheer up by joining clubs.
For the big blocks, each writer must find a way to reverse the negative psychic energy that has built up. For Carson McCullers, blocking on A Member of the Wedding at the Yaddo writer's retreat, it was lying stomach-down on the ground and beating her fists on the manuscript and calling "Mother! Mother!" Cry and curse, then find the ladder that John H. Johnson talks about (see head of chapter). Use no polite method; borrow the techniques of sports and combat heroes. Pro football coach Mike Ditka developed a unique method of clearing his mind on the sidelines. As sportscaster John Madden described it: "Now you see, you bend over. You put both hands on your knees. And you spit. And good ideas come."
SPITTING won't be necessary in most situations. Ordinary word blockage is the very toil of writing. Some of it results from the contradictions of creating literature, what Harold Bloom calls "achieved anxiety" and what Plotnikov has described as "controlled crying." Always the questions, Is it too much? Not enough? Everything must be in balance, in harmony, but something must tip the scale. The whole writing business is a pretzel of paradoxes, from the philosophical to the technical levels. These are some of the mixed messages that tie writers in knots:
Just write for yourself; but write to sell.
Just get it down, even if it stinks; but don't settle for anything that displeases you.
Be clever and brilliant; but don't show off.
Avoid big words; but don't use too many little words.
Write with style; but don't let style call attention to itself.
Write something fresh and surprising; but don't go off the deep end.
Tell it as it is; but don't offend the wrong people or expose yourself to libel, invasion of privacy, or obscenity.
Know your subject, write about what you know; but don't overwhelm the reader with detail.
Use forceful words; but not too forceful for the thoughts delivered.
Be sincere; but remember Oscar Wilde's admonition that all bad poetry is sincere.
<#FROWN:R06\>
THE PROFESSOR
By Lydia Davis
A few years ago I used to tell myself I wanted to marry a cowboy. Why shouldn't an English professor say this to herself - living alone, fascinated by a brown landscape, spotting a cowboy in a pickup truck sometimes in her rearview mirror as she drives on the broad highways of the West Coast? In fact, I realize I would still like to marry a cowboy, though by now I'm living in the East and married already to someone who is not a cowboy.
But what would a cowboy want with a woman like me - not very easy-going, an English professor, the daughter of another English professor? If I have a drink or two, I'm more easy-going than if I don't, but I still speak correctly and don't know how to joke with people unless I know them well, and often these are university people or the people they live with, who also speak correctly. Although I don't mind them, I feel cut off from all the other people in this country - to mention only this country.
I told myself I liked the way cowboys dressed, starting with the hat, and how comfortable they were in their clothes, so practical, having to do with their work. Many professors seem to dress the way they think a professor should dress, without any real interest or love. Their clothes are too tight or else a few years out of style and just add to the awkwardness of their bodies.
After I was hired to teach for the first time I bought a briefcase, and then after I started teaching I carried it through the halls like the other professors. I could see that the older professors, mostly men but also some women, were no longer aware of the importance of their briefcases and that the younger women pretended they weren't aware of it, but the younger men carried their briefcases like trophies.
At that same time my father began sending me thick envelopes containing material he thought would help me in my classes, including exercises to assign and quotes to use. I didn't read more than a few pages sometimes when I was feeling strong. How could an old professor try to teach a young professor? Didn't he know I wouldn't be able to carry my briefcase through the halls and say hello to my colleagues and students and then go home and read the instructions of the old professor?
In fact, I liked teaching because I liked telling other people what to do. In those days it seemed clearer to me than it does now: If I did something a certain way, it had to be right for other people too. I was so convinced of it that my students were convinced too. Still, though I was a good teacher, I was something else inside. Some of the old professors were also old professors inside, but inside I wasn't even a young professor. I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.
More important than the clothes a cowboy wore, and the way he wore them, was the fact that a cowboy probably wouldn't know much more than he had to. He would think about his work, and about his family, if he had one, and about having a good time, and not much else. I was tired of so much thinking, which was what I did most in those days. I did other things, but I went on thinking while I did them. I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. I even had to think about what I was thinking and wonder why I was thinking it. When I had the idea of marrying a cowboy I imagined that maybe a cowboy would help me stop thinking so much.
I also imagined, though I was probably wrong about this too, that a cowboy wouldn't be like anyone I knew - like an old communist, or a member of a steering committee, a writer of letters to the newspaper, a faculty wife serving at a student tea, a professor reading proofs with a sharp pencil and asking everyone to be quiet. I thought that when my mind - always so busy, always going around in circles, always having an idea and then an idea about an idea - reached out to his mind, it would meet something quieter, that there would be more blanks, more open spaces; that some of what he had in his mind might be the sky, clouds, hilltops, and then concrete things like ropes, saddles, horsehair, the smell of horses and cattle, motor oil, calluses, grease, fences, gullies, dry streambeds, lame cows, still-born calves, freak calves, veterinarians' visits, treatments, inoculations. I imagined this even though I knew that some of the things I liked that might be in his mind, like the saddles, the saddle sores, the horsehair, and the horses themselves, weren't often a part of the life of a cowboy anymore. As for what I would do in my life with this cowboy, I sometimes imagined myself reading quietly in clean clothes in a nice study, but at other times I imagined myself oiling tack or cooking large quantities of plain food or helping out in the barn in the early morning while the cowboy had both arms inside a cow to turn a calf so it would present properly. Problems and chores like these would be clear and I would be able to handle them in a clear way. I wouldn't stop reading and thinking, but I wouldn't know very many people who did a lot of that, so I would have more privacy in it, because the cowboy, though so close to me all the time, wouldn't try to understand but would leave me alone with it. I would not be an embarrassment anymore.
I thought if I married a cowboy I wouldn't have to leave the West. I liked the West for its difficulties. I liked the difficulty of telling when one season was over and another had begun, and I liked the difficulty of finding any beauty in the landscape. To begin with, I had gotten used to its own kind of ugliness: all those broad highways laid down in the valleys and the new constructions placed up on the bare hillsides. Then I began to find beauty in it, and liked the bareness and the plain brown of the hills in the dry season, and the way the folds in the hills where some dampness tended to linger would fill up with grasses and shrubs and other flowering plants. I liked the plainness of the ocean and the emptiness when I looked out over it. And then, especially since it had been so hard for me to find this beauty, I didn't want to leave it.
I might have gotten the idea of marrying a cowboy from a movie I saw one night in the springtime with a friend of mine who is also a professor - a handsome and intelligent man, kinder than I am but even more awkward around people, forgetting even the names of old friends in his sudden attacks of shyness. He seemed to enjoy the movie, though I have no idea what was going through his mind. Maybe he was imagining a life with the woman in the movie, who was so different from his thin, nervous, and beautiful wife. As we drove away from the movie theater, on one of those broad highways with nothing ahead or behind but taillights and headlights and nothing on either side but darkness, all I wanted to do was go out into the middle of the desert, as far away as possible from everything I had known all my life, from the university where I was teaching and the towns and the city near it with all the intelligent people who lived and worked in them, writing down their ideas in notebooks and on computers in their offices and their studies at home and taking notes from difficult books. I wanted to leave all this and go out into the middle of the desert and run a motel by myself with a little boy, and have a worn-out cowboy come along, a worn-out middle-aged cowboy, alcoholic if necessary, and marry him. I thought I knew of a little boy I could take with me. Then all I would need would be the aging cowboy and the motel. I would make it a good motel. I would look after it and I would solve any problems sensibly and right away as they came along. I thought I could be a good, tough businesswoman just because I had seen this movie showing this good, tough businesswoman. This woman also had a loving heart and a capacity to understand another fallible human being. The fact is that if an alcoholic cowboy came into my life in any important way I would probably criticize him to death for his drinking until he walked out on me. But at the time, I had that strange confidence, born of watching a good movie, that I could be something different from what I was, and I started listening to country-western music on the car radio, though I knew it wasn't written for me.
At that point I met a man in one of my classes who seemed reasonably close to my idea of a cowboy, though now I can't tell exactly why I thought so. He wasn't really like a cowboy, or what I thought a cowboy might be like, so what I wanted must have been something else, and the idea of a cowboy just came up in my mind for the sake of convenience. The facts weren't right. He didn't work as a cowboy but at some kind of job where he glued the bones of chimpanzees together. He played jazz trombone, and on the days when he had a lesson he wore a dark suit to class and carried a black case. He just missed being good-looking, with his square, fleshy, pale face, his dark hair, mustache, dark eyes; just missed being good-looking, not because of his rough cheeks - scarred from shrapnel - but because of a loose or wild look about him, his eyes wide open all the time, even when he smiled, and his body very still, only his eyes moving, watching everything, missing nothing. Wary, he was ready to defend himself as though every conversation might also be something of a fight.
One day when a group of us were having a beer together after class, he was quiet, seemed very low, and finally said to us, without raising his eyes, that he thought he might be going to move in with his father and send his little girl back to her mother. He said he didn't think it was fair to keep her because sometimes he would just sit in a chair without speaking - she would try to talk to him and he wouldn't be able to open his mouth, she would keep on trying and he would sit there knowing he had to answer her but unable to.
His rudeness and wildness were comfortable to me at that point, and because he would tease me now and then, I thought he liked me enough so that I could ask him to go out to dinner with me, and finally I did, just to see what would happen. He seemed startled, then pleased to accept, sobered and flattered at this attention from his professor.
The date didn't turn out to be something that would change the direction of my life, though that's not what I was expecting then, only what I thought about later.
<#FROWN:R07\>
THE WHOLE TRUTH
By Stephen McCauley
She told her psychiatrist she was happily married and had taken a lover only because she was afraid of being too close to her husband, whom she'd wed six years earlier. If she'd been more truthful, she'd have confessed that she'd begun her affair with the dentist, whose office was in the same medical building as her own, because she was bored with her husband, and that fear of intimacy with her lover had driven her to sleep with the carpenter who'd come to work on the front steps of the house late in the summer. But she hadn't told her psychiatrist about the carpenter at all, because her indiscretion with him struck her as slightly sordid, and her psychiatrist was a gentle, bald man who sucked on sour balls and nodded eagerly as she spoke and reminded her too much of her father. She thought he might be upset to hear she'd fallen into bed with a relative stranger. Mentioning her ongoing affair with the dentist was surely enough. Besides, the steps were long finished, and she was quite certain she'd never see the carpenter again, let alone sleep with him, even though, in truth, she still thought of him often.
To compensate for her omissions, she transposed her feelings as she spoke. Thus, whenever she wished to talk about her fear of getting too close to her lover, she pretended she was talking about her husband. And when she talked about the sexual excitement of her affair with the dentist, she was really describing her fantasies about the carpenter. If she wanted to discuss the exasperating boredom of her marriage, she talked about a brief, boring first marriage, which she'd invented during her second week of analysis. It wasn't hard to keep track once she had it all down. And, she assured herself, the essence of what she was saying was true; she simply toyed with the names. As long as she was able to keep it all straight in her mind, her analysis would have some value.
It was her husband, who was kind and bald and reminded her a little of her father - and now her psychiatrist - who'd first suggested she seek treatment. She'd confessed to him that she was unhappy, although she'd told him it was because, after all the years of school and training, she was bored with dentistry. She'd hinted, too, but only in the most gentle way, that she was having doubts about their marriage, which, in fact, she was not. She knew she was bored and that the marriage was simply a matter of convenience for her and dependency for her husband. What she was having doubts about was her affair. When her husband asked her, as he did from time to time, what she'd told her psychiatrist about their relationship, she'd report some of the things she'd actually said about him, even though they were, of course, things she really felt about her lover.
Despite what she'd told her husband, she enjoyed her profession and, after four years, had established a successful practice. She and her husband lived in a university town, and many of her patients were young professionals and academic wives, the kinds of people who usually didn't need major dental work but who came dutifully three times a year for a cleaning and a checkup. To please them, she'd decorated her waiting room with old black-and-white photographs she'd bought at antique stores and easy chairs draped with printed cloth imported from India. The decor had first struck her as homey, if a bit cluttered. Now, however, her waiting room had begun to look to her like a psychiatrist's office. She avoided subscribing to the predictable dentist-office publications and instead kept recent copies of literary journals on the table by the door. She'd bought a narrow pine bookcase in which she kept story collections by contemporary writers whom she admired, even though she didn't care much for short stories.
Most of her patients called her by her first name, and many felt to her like casual friends. A number of women always asked her about her husband, and as she worked on their teeth she'd talk about him amiably, describing a man made up of equal parts of her spouse, her lover, and her fantasies about the carpenter.
Her mother lived in Kentucky and was proud of her achievements. The only regret her mother ever expressed was that her husband had not lived to see their daughter graduate from dental school. She was close to her mother, and they talked on the phone once a week for at least an hour. Wanting desperately to tell her about her psychiatrist, but not wanting to alarm her, she told her mother that her husband, who was twelve years older than she was, had started seeing a therapist three times a week. Therapist sounded more benign than psychiatrist. She told her mother her husband was having a mid-life career crisis. Feeling daring, she hinted at suspicions that he was also having an affair. Her mother listened sympathetically and suggested that perhaps she and her husband should go to Bermuda together for a week and try to work things out. She reminded her mother that her husband's therapy appointments made such a vacation impossible. After she'd hung up, she went to her husband and told him she thought he should take a vacation, even though she wouldn't be able to go along.
Her lover was also married. He was severe and serious and driven by nervous intensity. He bit his fingernails and sometimes, after they'd made love, would take her in his arms and weep. He would divorce his wife if she would divorce her husband. The two of them would go off together, set up a practice in a different city, and start life all over. She explained to him that she was tempted, but could not make any moves until she had resolved some things in analysis. When her lover asked her if she was telling her psychiatrist how much they loved each other and the passionate nature of their sexual relationship, she told him that she was, even though when she described to her psychiatrist her longing for the dentist, she was thinking of the carpenter. And when she told her psychiatrist about her desire to leave her husband, she was really describing her desire to break off her affair with the dentist.
She feared that if she confessed to her psychiatrist that she'd been unable to tell her mother about him, his feelings would be hurt, and he would think she was resisting treatment. So instead she told him that she'd told her mother, and that her mother had been understanding and helpful. While she was on the subject, she told her psychiatrist that it was her mother who'd suggested her husband take a week in Bermuda on his own. She didn't want to sound manipulative by admitting she'd suggested it to her husband herself, and her mother had, after all, been the one to bring up the subject of a vacation.
In the middle of November her husband noticed that the floor of the porch on the back of the house was beginning to rot, and he called the carpenter. He told her this one night over dinner, and she felt her heart race and sink and race and sink in a peculiar way, almost as if she were running a fever. He told her that the carpenter would begin work in the middle of the next week, the very Wednesday, in fact, he was leaving for Bermuda. He apologized that he would not be there to oversee the job. She told him that the carpenter had impressed her as reliable and would probably need very little supervision, and she finished her dinner hastily.
The Monday before her husband left on his trip, she decided to test the waters. She told her psychiatrist that a young man would be working on their house that week, that she had met him when he'd come to estimate the cost of the job, and that she had found him attractive. She told him he was a craftsman who painted walls with sponges so the finished surface looked like fine wallpaper. This skill, she felt, made the carpenter sound as sensitive and refined as she was certain he really must be. Her psychiatrist raised one eyebrow inquisitively when she told him this, a gesture that she took as a sign of disapproval. So she dropped the subject of the carpenter quickly, and told him, as if confessing it, that she was looking forward to her husband's departure so that she could spend more time with her lover, the dentist.
She canceled her appointments for Wednesday, drove her husband to the airport, and sped home in a state of confused anticipation. It was an oddly warm day, nearly eighty, and the November sky was blank and murky in the Indian-summer heat. She waited for the carpenter on the front steps of the house, dressed in a long skirt made of thin cotton and a baggy blouse, trying to read a collection of stories recommended to her by a patient.
When he finally arrived, she felt embarrassed, certain that he could read her anxiety and its source on the brow. She was only somewhat relieved to notice that he, too, seemed uncomfortable.
She stayed in the house all day, cleaning and arranging drawers and cautiously looking out the kitchen window to the porch where the carpenter was working. It wasn't until late in the afternoon, when he was sweeping up for the day, that she asked him inside and offered him a drink.
She called her receptionist the next morning and canceled her patients for the rest of the week. Then she called her lover and told him she'd decided to take advantage of her husband's absence by visiting her mother in Kentucky for a few days. She left a message on her psychiatrist's answering machine, explaining that she'd decided to go to Bermuda with her husband after all and would therefore miss her next two appointments.
The carpenter was five years younger than she was, dark-eyed and appealingly stocky. He wore blue jeans and a red T-shirt. He worked diligently on the porch for the next two days. Now and again he'd enter the house, and kiss her teasingly and tell her she was beautiful. When he finished work for the afternoon, he'd come inside, sweaty and exhausted, and they'd make love, though never, he insisted, in the bed she shared with her husband.
On Saturday night she prepared him an enormous, complicated dinner. After the meal, they lay together on the sofa in the living room with the curtains drawn and a light sheet pulled over their bodies. There had been a rainstorm that afternoon, and the weather had turned seasonably cool, though the rooms of the house were still warm. He told her he loved her, and she kissed him thankfully, even though she wasn't young or sentimental enough to believe he meant it.
He told her he was moving to Texas for the winter. He had friends there who had offered him a job for a few months; he'd put his books and his furniture into storage and drive south. He didn't really know how long he'd stay away. She was struck all at once by how wonderfully simple it sounded, by how unentangled and uncomplicated his life was compared with her own. It seemed pure, clean, and enviable. Jokingly, he asked her if she'd like to go with him She told him she would in a soft, choking voice. She buried her face in his broad chest and began to laugh at the idea. Her laughter fed on itself until she lost control completely and discovered that she was weeping.
She rarely cried. She had cried only once in front of her psychiatrist.
<#FROWN:R08\>
Selling Whiskers
One day Edna Sarah's mother sent her out to sell the dog. He was not an ordinary dog, and certainly it was not ordinary in her neighborhood to try and sell a dog by going from house to house, but Edna Sarah, who was ten, did not have much choice; or so she felt.
When her mother told her what she was thinking, it was during supper, a rather measly supper, but that was her mother's excuse for selling the dog, which Edna Sarah knew was completely false. The house was stuffed with food. The cabinets in the kitchen were overflowing. The refrigerator was threatening to burst. If Edna Sarah opened the door to the pantry, a can from the highest shelf always fell out, so she had given up trying. Besides, her mother had a nose that could sniff out the smallest crack in a bag of raisins, a food Edna Sarah had not thought of as particularly aromatic, crouched last week in the linen closet, the door suddenly flung open, her mother there, her hand quick, no food between meals, she snapped, the bag of raisins gone, the door slammed shut.
In fact, Edna Sarah had begun to think of the food in the house as not food at all but artifacts. She knew that her mother kept boxes of Girl Scout cookies stacked in her closet, and the big chocolate candy bars that kids sold to make money for organizations stuffed in her drawers, six-packs of small green Coca-Cola bottles under her bed, and lots and lots of bags of oyster crackers strewn around the room as though they were decorator pillows. Everything was well-packaged and well-sealed and had a long shelf life.
"I think we should sell Whiskers," her mother said. They were seated at the table in the kitchen, which was bare except for their plates and utensils. Edna Sarah was picking at a Vienna sausage. She had two on her plate. Of course, Whiskers had few whiskers, but her mother had wanted a cat to keep the mice population down. They had no mice and they had no cat, but they did have a purebred West Highland terrier with one eye; and they did have food but it was inaccessible, a word that hit Edna Sarah in her gut and her soul the first time her teacher defined it.
"I don't want to sell Whiskers," she said.
"I know you don't want to," answered her mother. She ran her noticeably thin fingers through her sheer blond bangs. "Who ever wants to sell their pet? Their trusty and beloved pet."
"Somebody, maybe," said Edna Sarah, looking down, "but not I."
"Why can't you say 'me'?" Her mother pierced the remaining Vienna sausage on her plate with a fork. "It's not normal."
"Not me," she answered, twisting the end of her long blond braid. "I'm not going to sell him."
"But, dear," her mother leaned forward, the Vienna sausage clinging to her fork, "can't you see how we've been brought to this?"
"I guess so," said Edna Sarah. She tapped her roll. It made a hollow sound. She could actually remember a Sunday morning last fall when her mother had made pancakes, the warm, buttery smell rising into Edna Sarah's bedroom and her father calling out for her to come. The night before, they had stayed up late, all three of them, lying on a quilt in the grass to watch for falling stars. But even then there were signs: three pancakes each, no more, the rest of the batter scraped into a clean mayonnaise jar to grow mold in the back of the refrigerator. "I haven't lost my commission yet," her father laughed. Her mother tightened the lid on the jar and looked at Edna Sarah. There are never any guarantees, baby. Her father rose from the table, the crossword puzzle in his hand. After the holidays he was gone, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, away on his ship for another six months.
But they were fine, her mother said when the ombudsman called; and yes, she would be at the meeting, to the Commander's wife; and of course Edna Sarah could go to the movie with Adrienne (even as the food disappeared from their plates, a little here and a little there). These days Edna Sarah ate every bite of her hot lunch at school, paid for with her allowance, and put the non-perishables in her backpack for the weekends. To anyone who asked, she said she was having a growth spurt, but it set her apart, the care she took, even from her friends. She guessed she understood how she and her mother had come to this.
"I guess so?" Her mother's voice rose. "I guess so? The evidence is everywhere." And she swept her arm around the room, across the overstufffedoverstuffed pantry, the burgeoning refrigerator, and the cabinets that would not close. "Whiskers," she called, "come here," and he dutifully came, his ears up, his tail wagging, his nose poised, the one good eye wide and open, the other gone, its eyelid sunken and shriveled. He was a good dog. "Whiskers," she said, "you are eating us out of house and home," and she gave him the Vienna sausage off her fork. He smacked and chewed and licked his lips, and then he came over to Edna Sarah's chair. She looked at her mother's plate and the empty fork. Yes, her mother had given Whiskers a Vienna sausage, although it broke all the rules. So Edna Sarah took one of hers and gave it to Whiskers and stroked him on the head.
"Good God!" her mother yelled. "You have given the dog the last bite of food in the house!"
It was useless for Edna Sarah to point out the remaining sausage on her plate, let alone the roll. They no longer existed. She stood up from the table and pushed back her chair. "How much do you want me to sell him for?"
"Two hundred dollars," her mother answered. "It's the least we can ask for such a fine animal." Then she rose from the table and took her plate to the sink and carefully scraped what was not there into the disposal. "And, dear," she turned back, "please don't come home until you've sold him. It's a terrible thing to ask, I know, but we are simply that desperate." Edna Sarah looked at her mother and saw that she believed every word she was saying.
So Edna Sarah went to the closet and got the new retractable leash her mother had bought only recently and put it on Whiskers - he wagged his tail and grinned - then together they walked several blocks to a part of the neighborhood where nobody knew her. The evening was warm. The light was soft. The day lilies were blooming. She started to whistle, "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes," Whiskers sniffing here and there and lifting his leg to pee a little.
The first house she decided to try was on Maplewood, a white house with a red tile roof and a big yard edged with flowers. There was a sliding board and a sandbox and a long swing hanging from a tall tree. She imagined the lift she could get out of that swing, especially with a decent push. In fact, she remembered having once seen a man on his knees at the front flower bed. She rang the doorbell. The man came to the door.
"Yes?" he said, and smiled. He was tall and slender and was wearing a white T-shirt and khaki shorts and looked to Edna Sarah like someone who might like to wrestle with his children on the floor. She had seen some fathers do this. She smiled at the man and picked up Whiskers and held him in her arms.
"Would you like to buy my dog?" she asked. "There's nothing wrong with him, except one of his eyes is missing." Whiskers was quiet in her arms.
The man came out onto the porch. "My mother has a Westie named Duffy," he said and reached out and stroked the dog's head. "What's his name?"
"Whiskers," she answered.
"Hello, Whiskers," he said. Whiskers' shriveled eyelid twitched and he wagged his tail against her arm. She heard the voice of a child inside and what must have been the voice of the mother. She strained her ears. "Why are you selling him?" the man asked.
"Oh, you know," she said, stroking Whiskers' back, "sometimes people get tired of their dogs." Just then a little girl pushed open the storm door and ran up beside the man. She was fair and slender and had a headful of thick dark hair and was wearing a dress.
"Doggie!" she said. "Beautiful doggie!" The man reached down and picked her up and showed her how to touch the dog. Edna Sarah was ecstatic. They would buy Whiskers and she would come back to visit him and they would all wrestle on the carpet and push each other on the swing and she would stay to help the mother fix dinner and eat it.
"Look," laughed the little girl. "He's kissing my hand."
"I know," said Edna Sarah. "He likes you." And she stroked Whiskers' back and smiled.
"How much are you selling him for?" the man wanted to know.
"Two hundred dollars," she told him. "It's the least we can ask for such a fine dog."
"He is a fine dog." Then the man put the little girl down and told her to run inside and ask her mother to help her put on her pajamas; she stared at Edna Sarah.
"I have a boo-boo," she said, "a very bad boo-boo." She pointed to a Band-Aid on the side of her knee, just below the hem of her dress.
"My goodness," said Edna Sarah.
"Do you want to see it?" she asked, and reached for the Band-Aid, just as the mother came out onto the porch, tall and slender with short dark hair. She smiled at Edna Sarah, scooped up the little girl, and they disappeared into the house. Edna Sarah heard the child say, "I was talking to that girl."
"I know," the mother answered. "You're very precocious."
Edna Sarah smiled at the man. "So", she said, "would you like to buy my dog?"
He smiled back but his eyes were tired. "I guess not. The yard isn't fenced in. The house is small. My daughter is unpredictable." He touched Whiskers' nose.
Edna Sarah put Whiskers on the porch and straightened his leash. "I have to be going," she said, then, "come on, buddy," and down the steps they went.
"Good luck," the man called.
"Thank-you," she answered, but did not turn around. She walked straight across the street to the house on the other side, a tall yellow house with dark green shutters and an overgrown sort of yard. Someone had left a wagon with a high, straight handle on the front walk. Edna Sarah rang the doorbell and a black woman opened the door. She was tall and robust and said, "Hi," just as a little boy about the size of the little girl across the street pushed himself around the woman's legs and stood poised on the threshold. Edna Sarah could see that he was not her son, his hair blond and wavy, but he was sturdy, a very sturdy little boy.
"Das a dog," he said.
"Would you like to buy him?" Edna Sarah asked. She picked up Whiskers and looked at the woman. "He's a purebred West Highland terrier with a missing eye, but you would never know it from the way he acts, and he loves children." Whiskers' shriveled eyelid twitched.
"I want to touch dat dog," the little boy said.
"Why are you selling him?" the woman asked, and she picked up the little boy, who stretched his hand toward Whiskers.
<#FROWN:R09\>
8
In a few days' time, my handcuffs won me an acceptance by the villagers I never would have earned had I simply stayed in the village, even for the rest of my life. The handcuffs gave me a logical occupation, that of prisoner, and a reason for not simply spending my money and leaving. The children who kept trying to sell me Chiclets now desisted. Now, as I stood on the riverbank, they would come up to stand beside me and slip their slim wrists through my free handcuff. Some would solemnly march around the village with me as if they were doing penance. Others thought it was funny to slip a hand into the cuff and hang from it as if unconscious. They loved being dragged by me across the village square.
I almost came to like the handcuffs. I found I could use them to open bottles of beer. The drinking club found this amusing; they made up sayings about the uses of bondage, and their discussions of freedom became humorous and speculative. Some of them could not look at me while they discussed my situation. They spoke to me in the third person. "How is the prisoner today?" they asked. For a while they called me el simbolito, the symbol, and I got a good feeling of how totally abstract their notion of freedom was. One night, Santiago gave the Thinkery a beautiful twist on an old Greek myth. He asked whether the reason the man kept wrestling with the boulder, and never quit trying to roll it to the top of the mountain, was that the boulder was too beautiful for him to leave it alone.
"I have felt such stones," Blind Jorge said, "and I know what you are talking about. They are weighted inside with something significant. They have a heavy coolness about them that becomes an obsession. We must be careful to choose our obsessions wisely."
"Our obsessions should be women," said Jesus. "Women or nothing at all."
This discussion reduced the drinking club to drunkenness and tears. "Pure obsessions purify," Lieutenant Hugo sobbed. "I know this because I am pure." Hugo was wearing a T-shirt that said "Don't ask me. I just work here."
After the eruption of the volcano and the first-ever showing of a movie in the village, the mood of the villagers had been high. They expected good things: some sort of divine good luck from the volcano's blessing and economic progress now that civilization in the form of a Rambo movie had reached the little river's shores. But when nothing obvious happened, they began to suspect a trick. Three rumors came to town that week.
Old man Wilson picked up on Blind Jorge's radio a report that a massive earthquake was predicted for the capital at three that same afternoon.
"Who predicted the earthquake?" I asked.
"The Star Wars people at NASA, in the United States."
"Impossible", I said.
"That's what Hector says. That's what Lieutenant Hugo says. But tell us, why then are all the schools closed in the capital, and why is everyone sitting outside in the capital city's parks?"
"Because they are ignorant."
"That's what Hector says. But tonight in the capital, the people will all camp outdoors. And so shall we."
And they did. They brought out their babies and blankets to the center of the soccer field and they set up a camp. They had a wonderful time. They danced and played volleyball, and the young lovers were able to promenade for a while and then sneak back up to their parents' empty houses. That evening the villagers lit cooking fires. Somebody butchered a pig and soon an aroma of roast pork filled the air. Some young American tourists joined the fiesta and sang folk songs, which pleased the villagers immensely.
Hector, Santiago, Hugo, and I stayed in the cantina, drinking beer and watching the festivities in the field.
"They are fools," Hector said. "I'll tell them when they can have an earthquake."
"They are having more fun than you are," I said.
Hector turned his big, slow eyes to me and shook his head. "I'll show them fun. I've got plans for these monkeys."
Santiago said, "I hope we don't have an earthquake tonight. It would mean years of enlightenment down the drain. Such setbacks to civilization have happened before."
"Don't worry," said Hugo. "I'll be in charge."
Hector belched and walked to the steps. He inhaled, filling his huge rib cage with the savory air. Then he laughed an enormous, evil, low-throated laugh and aimed it at the people in the square.
There was no earthquake that night. About midnight, it began to rain.
The second rumor came the next day, when some Swedish tourists brought in the news that President Reagan was dying. He had a cancer on his nose and it had spread to his brain.
"My God," said Consuelo, "he must look like those poor miscreants in the penny newspapers."
The Swedes had read the story in a capital city tabloid.
"You're sure of this?" I asked them.
They shrugged their shoulders and nodded. They had read it. Reagan had resigned and George Bush was now President.
That evening I ate dinner at Mama Cuchara's and pumped the tourists for information. They asked me what kind of president George Bush would be.
"Better," I said, but I had no idea.
Two days later, Wilson picked up another report on the radio. A four-engine airliner had left the capital and disappeared. On a clear blue afternoon, it had taken off to fly down the Valley of the Volcanoes and then had disappeared with fifty-four people on board. The next day, the radio supplied three new rumors. The first was that the plane had fallen into the caldera of a volcano and the people were all alive but trapped in a land that time had forgotten, a land complete with dinosaurs. The radio announcer interviewed a university professor about dinosaurs. Another rumor was that the plane had been caught in the ray of a UFO and the passengers were all alive but trapped on another planet. The announcer interviewed a psychic medium who had contacted the pilot. The third rumor was that the plane had been hijacked by Colombian drug runners and made to fly to Colombia. It was being used to fly cocaine into the United States and the passengers were all alive but being turned into slaves to labor on a marijuana plantation.
The villagers believed all three of these rumors.
"This same thing happened before," they said, "three years ago. And those fifty-four passengers are still gone too."
That precipitated a thinking club discussion on the consequence of numbers.
"Why did both planes have fifty-four passengers?"
"Maybe that is the number of seats," I said.
"And what is the significance of that number equaling the number of weeks in a year?"
"There are fifty-two weeks in a year," I said.
"So far," they acknowledged, "that has been the case, but that figure is arbitrary, is it not? And numbers are arbitrary and, thus, capricious. Just look at the lottery."
"The lottery is random," I said. "It has nothing to do with anything human. Arbitrary, capricious, or personal."
"Tell that to the fifty-two people on that airplane," they said. "Tell that to the devil on the day you die."
"People who die on Sunday," Jesus politely warned me, "do not always go to heaven."
The next day the radio announced that the United States Air Force had sent an aircraft to assist in the search for the missing airliner. The plane was equipped with sophisticated sensors which could detect the wreckage of the plane beneath the snow on a volcano summit or beneath the canopies of the jungle trees.
This was the report that really disturbed the villagers. "Is this so?" they asked me. "Can this plane see through the trees? With what? With secret rays?"
This time the villagers took refuge indoors, inside the few buildings with tin roofs, which they hoped would shield them from the rays. They kept Jorge's radio on a cardboard box just outside the cantina, and the cantina became the scene of a Drinking and Thinking Club marathon, a forty-eight-hour symposium which discussed and dismissed as hopeless although interesting almost every problem known to man. Santiago assured me he did not believe in any danger, but he said the situation had its good aspect, the gathering of so many fine minds for such an extended time.
Wilson had been hurt on his motorcycle, which Hector had mysteriously gotten back from the soldiers. Now Wilson wanted to sue the Army for damaging his motorcycle, which had led to his accident, which had led to his swollen ankle.
"You need a lawyer for that," Jesus told him. "And all the real lawyers are in the capital city."
"Fine. He'll go," Napoleon said. "Wilson will press for his rights."
"He will need proof he was hurt," Blind Jorge pointed out.
"I have my ankle," said Wilson, and he took off a black rubber boot and displayed his injury. His ankle was black and green.
"Such evidence is circumstantial. You need an affidavit from a certifiable physician. And for that you will need an autopsy."
"How much does that cost?" Wilson asked. "Can I get it free from the Peace Corps lady at Huasipungo Pass?"
"Autopsies are never free," Wilson was told. "Otherwise, they wouldn't stand up in court. The widow Palos has an autopsy for her dead husband, Pedro. It is framed on the wall of her house. It has more government stamps than a letter to Lima."
"Perhaps I could use her autopsy," Wilson said.
"Not a chance, dear Wilson. The widow does not know what an autopsy is. She thinks it is a letter of condolence and honor from the erstwhile President of the Republic, who is now under the government's convenience of a house arrest. She would never part with it."
I told them that autopsies were performed on dead people, to determine what had killed them. They looked at me as if I had missed the whole point of the discussion.
"Thank you for the clarification," they said politely.
Santiago interceded and guided the discussion toward philosophy. "If autopsies are performed on dead people, we must ask, Why?" he said. "And why aren't they more logically performed on living people, to determine what is keeping them alive?"
"It is hope," Jesus said. "They say that hope cannot be found with a surgeon's knife. A dead person has sometimes died through the process of releasing hope, albeit involuntarily. People have seen this hope releasing. It is colored blue."
"Why blue?" Blind Jorge asked.
On the second day of the death rays, Napoleon left the cantina to help Angelina provision her canoe. She drifted away on another scientific expedition, with a group of British scientists who looked at us as if we were fools.
"Santiago," said El Brinco, "your daughter is extraordinarily brave."
At this, Lieutenant Hugo stood up. "Gentlemen," he said. "The time for defense is past. The first barrage of killer rays is over. It is time now to leave our bunker and find our airliner ourselves. Our country for our countrymen. Our dead for likewise. Our duty for the love of our mothers. Now, who volunteers to join in the official search and rescue?"
Everyone looked straight at Hugo and no one said a word. Hugo took this as if he had expected it. He turned to me. "You. I want to believe I can trust you."
I jangled my handcuffs. "Go ahead," I said. "Trust me."
"It is accepted military procedure to allow prisoners to regain their honor on dangerous missions. We march at dawn."
They all looked at one another and then cheered and called for beer. El Brinco ran out of beer that night, and we left the next day in the late afternoon to an absolute absence of fanfare.