What did it matter what I said? By morning I would be long gone. “How about nine?”
“Nine it is,” she said. “You’re sure you’re going to be all right by yourself tonight?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
I walked her to the front door and opened it to a fresh blast of heat. “I don’t think you’re going to regret being here,” she said.
“I don’t either.”
I watched her hobble across the wilted lawn and gave her a wave as she got into her tiny red Miata. The car crept down the street, drifted to the left, narrowly missing two parked SUVs, and disappeared.
I closed the door and locked it. Moving through the house, I peered out the windows. There was a garden in the back and a narrow alley. In the bedroom, a green bedspread matched the green walls. Skinny volumes of poetry lined the bookshelves. Lit up by the late afternoon sun, a Houston Astros baseball cap perched on a windowsill like a dozing cat.
I took off my trousers, threw them in the washer with a cupful of detergent, and punched the start button. I lay down on the bed to take a nap, and when I awoke, dusk had fallen. The lights had gone on in my landlady’s windows and I could see the shadows of people moving around inside. In a tree in the front yard a flock of the ugliest birds I’d ever seen were settling in for the night, screeching and whistling like something out of a Hitchcock movie.
I pulled my trousers out of the washing machine and checked the pant leg. The spattering of blood was fainter, but not gone. I tossed the trousers in the dryer and padded into the kitchen to inspect the refrigerator. It was stocked with spicy tofu, seaweed salad, and bean sprouts, with not a scrap of meat anywhere. I stood there in my underwear and tried a little of each, forking the stuff straight out of the plastic containers, but I was too roiled up to eat much.
So what was my next move? It was still early. I could have called a cab, gone back out to the airport, gotten another flight. But a flight to where? I knew enough to know that running around like a scared rabbit was the worst thing I could do. Like Barry used to say, willy-nilly tends to get old Willy killed.
What I wanted to do was call New York, find out from my old buddies if they’d heard anything, if anything had hit the papers, but for the moment I wasn’t willing to trust anybody.
So what about staying put? The situation was goofy as hell, but I looked like Mohle, everybody had signed these confidentiality agreements, and now I knew he wasn’t going to be showing up anytime soon. Where was I ever going to find a sweeter deal than that?
This required further thought. I fished my trousers out of the dryer, put them on, and sat down at the computer. I hacked away for a half hour or so before I miraculously came up with a couple of articles about Mohle.
He had been born in Newark and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan by schoolteacher parents. Eat Your Wheaties was the only book he’d ever written, but it was such an overwhelming success he went a little bonkers and retreated to this island off the Maine coast where no one had laid eyes on him in twenty-five years. The rumors were that he did nothing but eat vegetables and practice martial arts.
The more I read, the more Mohle’s book came back to me. The main character is this teenager named Hartley, who goes to some private school in New York and, with his buddy Jones, is always getting in trouble. Everyone gives him grief—his mother, his pompous stepfather, his teacher, his little sister—and when he can’t take it anymore, he and Jones run away, setting off across the country and having all these adventures.
I remember it as being a pretty good book, but I’d only been a kid when I’d read it. All I’d been interested in was the story. But the brainiacs quoted in the articles seemed to think there was a lot more to it than that.
The guy from the New York Times called it a spiritual quest and the editor in chief at some magazine called Harper’s said it was a devastating critique of American society. A jerk from a podunk college in Idaho had written a whole book about Mohle’s literary influences and how you couldn’t understand Hartley without understanding Prince Myshkin and Hans Castorp, whoever the fuck they were.
I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of pulling this off. I would have had to have memorized all the names of his ex-wives and girlfriends, his kung fu instructors, all his colleagues at the New Yorker. I would have had to read all the million or so books he’d read, including, apparently, the Bhagavad Gita.
I turned off the computer, went into the bedroom, and pulled on the Houston Astros cap. It was past eleven. I figured the car rental places were closed and that there would be no more flights till morning. But there was more than one way to get out of town.
I found a screwdriver in a red toolbox in the pantry. I put it in my pocket, went to the front door, and eased it open. Insects chanted in the trees and the night was as steamy as a sauna. Letting the door close softly behind me, I made my way up the walk.
I peered around the dense hedge. Cars lined the block in both directions, roofs gleaming under the streetlights. Across the road was a small park half a football field wide.
I strolled down the sidewalk, Mr. Nonchalant, checking out all the vehicles. Now that most of the neighborhood had retired for the evening, my hope was that if I boosted a car the theft wouldn’t be discovered for a few hours—more than enough time to drive to Houston or Dallas, catch a morning flight, and get myself seriously lost, one way or the other.
Air conditioners shuddered like jetliners in the darkness. An old man dragged a hose down his driveway, paying me no mind, and through a living room window I could see a ponytailed young woman bouncing up and down to the strains of “Bad Girl” and swinging hand weights.
The heat was sapping. Two blocks down I found what I was looking for: an unlocked ‘91 Dodge Caravan. Stealing cars was not my specialty, but I still knew enough to know that with some of the older-model vans, all you needed to do was break the casing on the steering column and flip a switch.
I moseyed down an extra block, just to be sure the coast was clear, then turned and came back. I strayed to the curb, went down on one knee as if to tie my shoe, and gave the nearby houses a final once-over. There was nothing moving anywhere, not a sound. I stood up, took a deep breath, and pressed the door handle of the Dodge Caravan.
A howl erupted from the bowels of the park. It sounded like the Hound of the Baskervilles. I jumped back from the car. A snarling Doberman emerged from the trees, yanking a man in flip-flops and cutoffs behind him. For a moment I was sure my goose was cooked, that this was the van’s owner, but as they passed under the streetlights I saw the man’s goofy, half-crocked smile.
“Sorry about that,” he said. The dog wasn’t sorry about anything, straining at his leash. The man gave a hard jerk, which only made the animal crazier. In his free hand, the man held aloft his beer in a foam-rubber holder, trying not to spill it.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. My heart pounded a mile a minute and I could see drool oozing from the corners of the Doberman’s mouth.
“He doesn’t bite,” the knucklehead said. “He’s nothing but a big puppy.”
“I see that,” I said. I felt for the screwdriver in my pocket; nothing would have given me greater pleasure than putting out the dog’s eye.
“So how the ‘Stros do tonight?” The man took a swig of his beer.
“The what?” The dog followed my every move with those little hate-filled eyes.
“The ‘Stros.” He pointed to my cap.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see.”
“Bagwell, I’m telling you, the guy’s been on fire.” The dog lunged forward again, and again was pulled up short. Beer splashed on the street and the man leapt back, wiping at his shorts. “Goddamn it, Ollie, what the hell’s the matter with you? That’s it, I’m taking you home! Listen, you have a good night, now, you hear?”
“You too,” I said.
He dragged the Doberman down the block, the animal’s toenails scraping along the cement. This resulted in a new b
arking fit, which in turn set off every dog in the neighborhood. It sounded as if I was surrounded by a pack of coyotes. One light went on in an upstairs window, a second on a porch on the far side of the park. A third on the lamppost in someone’s yard. I pulled my cap a little lower and slunk off down the sidewalk.
When I got back to the house, I found a bottle of vodka in the liquor cabinet, filled a glass with ice, and plopped down in front of the TV. I flipped from channel to channel before finally settling in with The Wizard of Oz.
My idea was that I would wait an hour or so until the coast cleared and take another shot at boosting a car. But after a second vodka—or maybe it was a third, I wasn’t keeping count—I found myself getting more and more involved in the movie. I felt for old Dorothy, trying to get back to Kansas, trying to figure out this topsy-turvy world she’d just been dropped into.
I drained my glass and set it down on the floor next to the sofa. My eyelids were drooping. Was I in any shape to drive anywhere? It had been a hell of a day. I found myself thinking how Barry would have loved this story of me passing myself off as a famous writer, but then I remembered that Barry was dead.
I woke to the sound of pounding on the front door. Sitting bolt upright on the sofa, I blinked at the clock in the kitchen. Five minutes to nine. Morning light streamed though the window above the sink.
“Oh, my God . . . Oh, my God . . .”
A bell ding-donged twice, followed by more pounding. The TV was still on, a couple of local anchors horsing around with the weatherman. I pushed off the sofa and moved swiftly through the house. I undid the latch on the kitchen door and slipped into the moist morning air.
The trick was going to be to get across the garden and into the back alley without anyone seeing me. Crouching low, I scuttled from rosebush to trellis to magnolia tree. I had one leg over the picket fence when a voice called out behind me, “Hook ‘em!”
I peered over my shoulder. A fleshy man with glasses and prematurely white hair and beard waved from the corner of the house. He pumped one arm in the air, forefinger and pinkie raised, middle two fingers folded under. A gesture like that could get you killed in New Jersey, but this was another country.
“Hook ‘em!” he shouted again. “Welcome to Texas!” He let himself in through the gate and strode across the garden, shielding his eyes from the morning sun. “Wayne Furlough here. I’m the director over at the institute.” He extended his hand. My head throbbed and my tongue felt like a Brillo pad.
“Oh, that’s right,” I said. His Hawaiian shirt looked freshly pressed. We shook as I swung down from the fence, careful not to deball myself.
“I’m sorry if I’m a little early,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. The man kept beaming at me. I couldn’t believe I’d slept nine hours straight.
“How about a little huevos?” he said.
“What’s that?” I squinted at him: the sun hurt.
“There’s this Mexican place down a few blocks. They have great breakfasts.”
It sounded like a terrible idea. “Tell you what, Wayne. I had sort of a rough night last night and haven’t had a chance to shower or anything. Why don’t you just go on to your office and I’ll give you a call?”
“I can wait.”
“No, no, you’re a busy man.”
“Not that busy. If you want, I’ll just sit out in the car.”
A tiny bell went off in my head. “The car?”
“Yeah. It’s parked right across the street.”
The answer to my problems was staring me in the face. I needed a car and he had one. I rubbed my hand across my mouth.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “A little huevos may be just what the doctor ordered.”
He took me to a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican café with murals everywhere and we were the only ones there besides the cook and the waitress. I chose a booth in the back where I could keep my eye on the door—the old Wild Bill Hickok trick. Not that I thought that the Cannettis would be looking for me here, but you can’t be too careful.
The man was beside himself with happiness. I think the only other time I’ve seen a grin that wide was on the sports page when they ran one of those pictures of some sunburned fisherman standing next to his record tuna.
It was as if he was in the grip of some kind of madness. He unwrapped my silverware for me before I could touch it, waved to the waitress to refill my coffee cup before it was half empty. The names of the writers he knew (all of which were lost on me) were dropping like crabapples in a windstorm. He explained the difference between adobado and tomatillo sauce, the quarterback controversy on the Texas football team, and the workings of the institute. He got a tiny shred of tortilla on his chin and I found myself watching it jiggle up and down like a frantic moth at a lantern.
I was seriously under the weather. I kept drinking water and my head throbbed. Every sound seemed to be ten times as loud as it should have been, from the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen to the horns of passing cars.
He went on about how I’d been the reason he’d stuck at his writing for as long as he had. Even though he was scarcely in the same league as I was—no one had ever heard of his work, really—he got up every morning at five-thirty to labor away at it in the hope that one day he might actually produce something he could be proud of. The car keys sat on the table between us; it was all I could do not to snatch them and make a dash for it. He began to tell me the plot of his new novel. It seemed to be about growing up in North Dakota and discovering a sack of drowned kittens. Maybe I was still under the spell of The Wizard of Oz, but I couldn’t help wondering what he would look like in a lion suit.
“So how many people know I’m around?”
“Mildred. Me. Your landlady. The president of the university. Our eight fellows. And Rex, of course.”
“Rex?”
“Now, don’t worry. You and Rex are going to be fine. As far as he’s concerned, he’s ready to let bygones be bygones. I can’t tell you how honored he is that you’re willing to go along with this.”
I gave him a long stare. He shoveled in another forkful of eggs and washed it down with coffee. The tortilla shred miraculously disappeared. He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Now, that was good, wasn’t it?”
“Wayne, can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“I don’t know if Mildred said anything to you or not, but the airlines misplaced my bags. I was wondering if I could borrow your car for a couple of hours. I’d sort of like to go buy myself some new clothes.”
“Not a problem.” His brow was beaded with sweat from all the hot sauce. “But before we go, let me give you something.” He took a large manila envelope out of his briefcase and handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I said. Outside the window, a sooty bum with a sea captain’s beard and black army boots pedaled his bicycle slowly by. He was wearing a skirt.
“Just something to make everything official.”
I undid the clasp and pulled out a sheaf of documents. It looked like the stuff I’d seen on Mildred’s desk, but at the back there was a letter, detailing my duties and compensation. They were going to pay me (or V. S. Mohle) seventy-five thousand dollars to lead a three-hour seminar once a week for fifteen weeks. Plus I had to give a reading, whatever the hell that was.
My eyes started to twitch. “Is everything all right?” Wayne asked.
“Oh, everything’s fine,” I said. I did the math in my head. They were going to pay Mohle sixteen hundred bucks an hour. Were these people insane?
I set the sheaf of papers down on the table and looked up at him. He seemed suddenly serene. Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as he looked.
“So we should probably go,” he said. “You can just drop me at my office on your way.”
When we arrived at the institute we parked on the street and he wrote out directions to the mall on the back of the manila envelope. We both heaved ourselves out of the car and I walked ar
ound to the driver’s side to give him a clap on his fleshy back. At ten-thirty in the morning, the roof of the Acura was already hot to the touch. Maybe Mohle had the right idea. It sounded pretty good, being up there in Maine, with a cool fog rolling in off the ocean.
I told Wayne I’d probably be back in a couple of hours and he told me to take all the time I needed; he had enough work to last him all day.
“If you’ve been up since five-thirty,” I said, “you probably need a nap.”
“No, I’ll be fine,” he said. That shirt of his was something. I made a mental note never to wear anything with hula dancers on it.
I watched him walk into the institute, waiting until the door had swung shut behind him. He was sort of a sweet guy. I just hoped he had good insurance, because he’d just had his car stolen. I adjusted the seat, shifted into drive, and edged into traffic. I might not have known where I was going, but at least I wouldn’t have to listen to any more about his goddamned novel.
There were all kinds of end-of-summer sales out at the mall and I loaded up with two pairs of pants, six short-sleeved shirts, socks, underwear, and a cool pair of sunglasses. I changed in one of the changing rooms and dumped my old clothes in a trash can.
I wandered through the corridors in my new clothes, past the jewelry kiosks and the honey cashew stands. A security guard jawed with a cute clerk from Foot Locker, paying me no mind.
I knew it was time for me to hit the road, but I found myself dragging my feet, I didn’t quite know why. Maybe it was that walking away from seventy-five thousand dollars felt like a sin, maybe it was starting to sink in just how hard it was going to be, out there on my own with no one to talk to, no one to help. Barry wasn’t always the smartest guy in the world, but I’d counted on him. Without Barry, I had no idea who I was.
As I passed a bookstore, my eye was caught by a bright white cover in the window and then by its title: Eat Your Wheaties. I backpedaled a couple of steps to take a closer look. It was Mohle’s book, all right, in a snazzy new edition.
Famous Writers I Have Known Page 4