Famous Writers I Have Known

by James Magnuson

  “Hey!” I said. “Hey, hey, hey! Look who we’ve got here!”

  “Rex and I were out running errands,” Ramona said, “and we wondered if you’d like some ice cream.” She lifted a plastic sack to show me.

  “Ice cream?” I said.

  “It’s the best there is. We’ve got two kinds, chocolate and vanilla.”

  “Unless you don’t like ice cream,” Rex said. He was wilting, two huge sweat spots staining his khaki shirt. I didn’t like the idea of inviting them in, but on the other hand, it’s never a good idea to leave an octogenarian broiling in ninety-five-degree heat.

  “No, I like ice cream,” I said. “Why don’t you guys come in for a minute?”

  “Are you sure?” Ramona said.

  “Absolutely.”

  I took Rex by the elbow, led him in, and got him settled on the couch. When Ramona handed me the sack, I took a peek inside at the two bulging cartons. “This looks terrific!” I said. “What do you say I get bowls for all of us?”

  “That would be nice,” Ramona said.

  Ramona took a seat next to Rex while I went into the kitchen. I grabbed the bucket of KFC and pitched it in the trash. Luckily, neither of them seemed to have spied it. I could ill afford being outed as a meat-eater.

  I got three bowls down from the cabinet. “So what would you like?” I said. “Chocolate? Vanilla?”

  “A little of both would be good,” Ramona said. Rex had discovered a copy of the National Enquirer under the stack of my Wampanoag books and was leafing through it, too absorbed to answer (it was something I’d picked up at the corner grocery because of the story of the two-headed calf on the cover).

  I found my big serving spoon and started to carve away at the rock-solid ice cream. It was a good thing the cleaning lady had been there that morning, because Ramona was giving the place the eagle-eye. I was starting to get pissed. Wasn’t it a little rude, dropping in on people unannounced like this? Just when I was settling in for a nice quiet evening boning up on wampum?

  I sprinkled a few crushed nuts on the ice cream before carrying the bowls into the living room. Rex set the National Enquirer down, took his bowl with both hands, and dug in without waiting for anyone else. I pulled up a chair and snapped on one of the lamps (for safety’s sake, I usually kept the curtains closed).

  Ramona took a bite and I took a bite. Rex spilled a little vanilla on his khaki shirt and Ramona got a tissue to wipe it off. I took a second spoonful and rolled it around in my mouth, letting it melt.

  “So how’s everyone doing?” I asked.

  “I think we’re doing fine,” Ramona said.

  “And you?” Rex said. He plucked at the wet spot on his collar.

  “Good. Real good.”

  Rex chipped at the block of ice cream with the side of his spoon. “And classes?”

  “We’re getting along.”

  “I understand you have them doing exercises,” Rex said.

  “That’s right.”

  “ ‘Describe a field as seen by a cow. Do not mention the cow.’ “

  My face burned. I couldn’t believe the little jerks had ratted me out. “Mmm,” I said.

  Rex was looking very grave. “This was something you came up with?” Ramona asked.

  “No, it was Wayne’s idea, actually,” I said.

  Rex licked chocolate off his knuckle. “Sounds like it got a little out of hand.”

  “So who told you that?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” Rex said.

  “No, I think it does matter,” I said. “A lot.”

  It got very silent. The grackles were going crazy in the trees outside.

  “We were just thinking,” Ramona said, her voice as soft and soothing as a nun’s. “It must be very disorienting. Being down here all alone, so far from home, teaching for the first time.”

  “Anyone want any Reddi-Wip?” I said.

  They both shook their heads no. Ramona wore huge earrings that looked as if they could have been used as gongs by Buddhist priests. “Wayne tells me that you almost never leave the house,” Rex said.

  “We were thinking it might be nice if we could take you somewhere,” Ramona said. Sunlight glowed dully through the curtains.

  “Like where?” I said.

  “We could drive you out to the lake to see the eagles.”

  I slid my bowl onto the table and locked my fingers behind my head. “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Something else I really enjoy,” Rex said. “There’s a pioneer farm just north of town. They have all these wonderful agricultural implements.”

  I tried to dislodge a piece of nut from between my teeth with my tongue. It was hard to imagine anything worse than an afternoon looking at old plows, but in my business, you learn to play with the hand that’s dealt you.

  “So what are you doing this weekend?” I asked.

  “This weekend?” she said. They glanced at one another. “I’m not sure we could do anything this weekend. We’re going to a ranch.”

  “A ranch?” I said. “With cattle and horses and all that?”

  “The whole shebang,” Rex said. “It’s an amazing place. It belongs to a guy named J. R. Hudspeth. It’s been in his family for generations. One of the biggest cattle operations in Texas.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You think I could come along?”

  “Come along?” Ramona said. “I don’t think we could do that.”

  “Why not?” The smell of extra-crispy chicken lingered in the air.

  “How would we introduce you?” she said.

  Sometimes the things my brain comes up with truly amaze me. “You could just say that I’m Rex’s assistant. He’s already got one. Why couldn’t he have two?”

  Ramona seemed dumbfounded. Rex stirred his bowl. “You wouldn’t be insulted?” he asked. “Pretending to be working for me?”

  “I wouldn’t be pretending. I do work for you.” The house was slowly darkening around us. With the three of us sitting under a single lamp, it felt as if we were huddled in a cave.

  “Sounds a little tricky,” Rex said.

  Ramona’s huge earrings swayed as she turned to him. “But it might be fun.”

  “Fun?” Rex said. “I’ve never been big on fun.”

  He went back to scraping up the last of his ice cream. Did he suspect I was trying to pull a fast one? Probably. And probably I was, even though I didn’t know quite what that fast one was yet.

  “Well, hey, it was just an idea,” I said. “I’ve got plenty to do here. It’s just that I’ve never seen a ranch. It’s always been one of my childhood dreams. I’ve been a big Roy Rogers fan ever since I got a cap pistol for my sixth birthday.”

  Rex gave me that sideways look of his, as if he couldn’t decide if I was dicking him around or if I was just deranged. “You two think we could pull this off?” We both nodded yes. Rex stood and tugged at the legs of his high-water pants. “It’s just that I hate lying to people.”

  “Oh, God, me too,” I said. “But I’m not sure this would really count as lying.”

  “I imagine you would take a more liberal view on that than I would,” Rex said. “But what the hell, let’s give it a try.”

  They were forty minutes late picking me up on Saturday morning, and as soon as I climbed into the front seat of the maroon van I could tell something was off. Ramona sat stone-faced behind the wheel and Schoeninger, propped up in the back and engulfed in pillows like a Turkish pasha, looked so grim you would have thought the Russkies had just dropped the big one. I peered over the headrest.

  “Everybody doing all right?”

  “We’re here,” Schoeninger said. His Velcro-strapped tennis shoes rested on a red cooler. I glanced over at Ramona. She raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. It seemed wise not to press.

  It took us a while to get out of town. There was a lot of new road construction and a junky sprawl that seemed to go on forever: car lots, taxidermy warehouses, Christian academies and real estate development
s that weren’t much more than gaudy wrought-iron gates, fluttering plastic flags, and freshly bulldozed trails snaking through the cedar.

  The silence in the van was unnerving. It was clear that they’d been fighting, which I had no problem with, but what if it was about me?

  “You two have been awfully quiet this morning,” I said. More silence. “I hope it’s nothing I’ve done.”

  “She won’t let me have a dog,” Rex said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Rex, that’s not true,” Ramona said. “All I said was, we need to sit down and have a serious discussion about this. The cook says she’s going to quit if you get a dog.”

  “Man sells a hundred million books and they won’t let him have a puppy,” Rex said.

  “And who’s going to take care of it? Who’s going to walk it? And if he gets under your chair and you trip and break your hip—”

  “Man climbs the Pyrenees and they think he can’t keep from stumbling over a pet . . .”

  “Rex, that’s not the issue.”

  We ascended a long hill and all of a sudden we could see for miles in every direction. White goats scampered in the brush and small rock farmhouses baked in the August heat.

  “So tell me about this guy we’re going to see,” I said.

  “You mean Hudspeth?”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “The warden here didn’t fill you in?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  Rex gave me the rundown. Hudpseth had fought in the Pacific, was a great history buff, and was a fervent believer in cryogenics. The great sorrow of his life was that none of his children had chosen to follow him into ranching. He loved Herodotus, hated Lyndon Johnson, the Sierra Club, and people who built too near the road. He sounded like quite the character.

  “So does this guy know I’m coming?” I asked.

  “I called him last night,” Ramona said.

  “And what did you tell him about me?” I asked.

  “The bare minimum,” she said.

  “Ahh,” I said. “So how exactly are we going to handle this?”

  “Have at it,” Rex said. “I’m going to leave it all up to the two of you.”

  His mood made it hard to have a normal conversation, at least at first, but Ramona and I did our best. She had a million questions. Not only did she want to know who I was going to pass myself off as—her suggestions included a disgraced rabbinical student, a failed journalist, an ex-jockey, someone with a private income trying to find himself—she wanted to pin down every detail. Who had my parents been? Where had I grown up? What schools had I gone to? Was I a good student or a bad one? What were my favorite books?

  I found it annoying. What Ramona didn’t understand was that I was an old pro at this stuff. All I required was a little artistic freedom.

  What I needed from her was a description of the typical Schoeninger assistant (leaving her out of it, of course). Smart but insecure was my bet. But were they broken people or did they have some sass to them? And what was Rex looking for when he hired them? A cheerful personality? Off-the-charts IQ? Someone who knew how to keep his mouth shut? Or the can-do type?

  When I asked her what an average day was like, she reeled off a list of duties—answering fan mail, taking Rex to the doctor, doing research, proofreading, shopping for clothes, making travel arrangements, fending off unwanted visitors—but she was still fixated by the idea of coming up with a credible biography for me.

  “I’ve got it!” she said. “You can be a former yoga instructor! Isn’t it perfect? It’s something you already know everything about.”

  “No way I’m going to go out to a ranch posing as a yoga instructor,” I said. “Please, Ramona, I can take care of this.”

  “But we all need to be on the same page here . . .”

  “And you need to trust me,” I said.

  “I’ve got it.” Rex had been silent in the backseat for so long, I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “What’s that, Rex?”

  “Your name is F. Horton Caldwell. You’ve got a Ph.D. from Harvard. You wrote your dissertation on boat-building in the New England colonies and Henry Steele Commager was your thesis advisor. You taught at Haverford for five years, but when your wife ran away with a colleague, your life pretty much fell apart, and when I found you, you were a textbook salesman in Saskatchewan.”

  I was impressed. I wasn’t the only one with a knack for deceit. For several seconds no one said a word. I took a peek in the mirror. He stared back at me, his bony old head resting against the pillows. He looked about as kindly as a parking meter.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  As we came out of a long curve, I spotted a tin-roofed country store fifty yards ahead of us. A bunch of middle-aged bikers sat on the porch eating PowerBars.

  “Let me pull over here,” Ramona said. “I promised the Hudspeths I’d call if we were going to be late.”

  We drove for another couple of hours, the scenery getting wilder and wilder, with the kind of high ridges where you’d expect Tonto to be poking his head over any minute. Up and down we went, through a series of valleys fifty miles across. At the bottoms, the rivers that had cut them were just trickles of water winding through sandbars.

  The towns were few and far between. Some were abandoned and those that weren’t were dirt-poor. On the open highway there was nothing to see except flocks of buzzards that would wait until the last second before abandoning their splattered armadillo innards and flapping to the safety of nearby fence posts. Rex dozed off in the back, snoring softly. I racked my brain for anything anybody had ever told me about Saskatchewan. Was that the place where they had the totem poles?

  Ramona finally pulled over to a high iron gate. She fished a scrap of paper from her pocket, rolled down the window, and punched a series of numbers into a gray metal box. The gate creaked open on rusted joints.

  We coasted through and rumbled down a rutted road, clouds of dust billowing behind us. Schoeninger woke up with a start as we rattled over a cattle gap.

  “Are we there yet?”

  “Almost, Rex, almost,” Ramona said.

  We bounced down through some boulders and finally we could see the river. Lined with cypress, it was a hundred yards wide above the dam, the size of a small lake. On the far bank, several buildings were set back among pecan trees and huge oaks. Swans glided farther up, near a small island, and a breeze ruffled the surface of the water.

  We bounced across a plank bridge and pulled up to the largest of the three cabins. A longhorn skull, eye sockets the size of softballs, glowered from a wooden bench. I got out, opened the rear door, and offered Schoeninger a hand.

  “About time, stranger!”

  I turned at the sound of the booming voice. A white-haired man in a neatly pressed J. C. Penney short-sleeved shirt hobbled around the corner of the house. He was barrel-chested and energetic, like an old drill sergeant, not exactly the kind of guy you think would want his head frozen after his death.

  He helped me pry Schoeninger out of the car, clapped him on the back a little too heartily, and gave Ramona a bear hug. Turning, he raised one corkscrewy eyebrow, giving me a quick once-over.

  “So this is the Harvard guy?”

  “F. Horton Caldwell,” I said. “I’m honored to meet you.”

  “I’ll bet you are.” He grabbed Schoeninger by the elbow. “I was thinking we’d throw your bags in the cabin and then I’d take you boys for a little ride around the place.”

  I got Ramona’s camera out of the van, figuring it would be nice to have a few pictures of the old geezers together, and climbed into Hudspeth’s pickup next to Rex, leaving Ramona behind to help Mrs. Hudspeth get dinner.

  As far as I could tell, the ranch seemed to be about the size of Africa. We kept crossing and recrossing the boulder-filled river and stopped every once in a while to inspect an old Mexican graveyard or check out Hudspeth’s new lick tubs.

  I could still feel Rex’s
discomfort with the whole situation and it didn’t help to have Hudspeth tease him about it. “So Ramona tells me you’ve got yourself a vegetarian assistant, Rex. Exactly how many of these characters you got working for you? You’ve almost got more people running around than I do, and I’ve got forty thousand acres to take care of.”

  But once we got out to the farther reaches of the ranch, Hudspeth was too busy auditioning for a role in Rex’s next book to pay much attention to me.

  Because I was sitting on the outside, it was my job to open all the gates. “Harvard,” Hudspeth would say, “get that for me, will you?” I’d hop out, run over, unwrap the chain, and hold the gate open so he could drive through.

  I played my part as best I could. When we came to a 150-year-old Comanche campsite, I got out the camera and took some nice photos of the two of them with the river and the cliffs in the background. When we found a perfectly intact cow skull that Hudspeth wanted Rex to take home with him, I was the one who got to carry it back and toss it in the rear of the truck.

  When we were standing on a high ridge and Hudspeth spied a family of feral pigs trotting along the bottom of a draw, I was the one who got to run to the pickup, yank the rifle from the gun rack and come running back on the double. Hudspeth grabbed it from me without so much as a thank-you, wheeled, and fired a half dozen wild shots into the brush below us, while Rex and I stood with our fingers in our ears.

  The whole thing was hilarious, really, Hudspeth bossing me around without a clue to the fact that I was one of the world’s greatest authors. Rex began to relax when he saw that I wasn’t taking offense.

  It wasn’t long before he got into the spirit of it himself. “Horton,” he’d say, “would you get a picture of those buzzards over there for us?” Or: “Horton, would you mind holding the canteen?” Or: “Horton, make a mental note. It might be good for you to spend a few days reading up on Black Angus.”

  And then I’d go, “Yes, sir, Mr. Schoeninger,” or “Mr. Schoeninger, I think that’s a great idea.” Maybe we were laying it on a bit thick, but Hudspeth was too self-absorbed to notice, proudly pointing out six dead coyotes hanging from a tree or explaining about tick fever.